Power of Atomic Habits to build better habits in 4 simple steps – Part 1

The book Atomic Habits by James Clear contains a treasure trove of useful, practical information to help you build new habits that you wish to develop be that: starting a new gym routine, daily walks, reading or studying for the Admin certification exam.

I would encourage to read (or listen to the audiobook) Atomic Habits but below is brief overview of some of the concepts covered in the book.

What is a habit? A habit can defined as a behaviour that has been repeated enough times to be automatic (e.g. brushing your teeth or tying up shoe laces).

Why do we develop habits?  Whenever we encounter a new situation in life, our brain has make a decision.  How do I respond to this? The first time you come across a problem, you’re not sure how to solve it (e.g. your usual commute to work is affected by a car accident closing off the usual path and you have to figure out an alternative route).  The level of neurological activity in the brain is high during this period.  You are taking in ton of new information and trying to make sense of it (sound familiar when studying).  The brain is busy learning the most effective course of action (e.g. using the example above mapping out an alternative route to take).  As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases (e.g. the next time the commute is interrupted in a similar manner, you know to switch to the previously used alternative route without thinking about it).

What are the benefits of the habits? Forming habits is extremely useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain.  The conscious mind can only focus on one problem at a time, as a result your conscious mind will always try to farm out tasks to the nonconscious mind to do automatically to preserve your conscious attention for whatever task is most essential.  This is where habits come in: habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.

The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps:

• Cue
• Craving
• Response
• Reward

I will go into more detail of the process of building a habit in the next post.