By Ron Cheong
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Dec. 28, 2024: With the New Year near many of us will be thinking of our New Year’s resolutions – those from last year we didn’t keep, and our new resolutions for 2025. To help in this direction I recall a bit of inspirational wisdom I heard as a child:
‘Sow a THOUGHT and reap an ACT
Sow a ACT and reap a HABIT
Sow a HABIT and reap a CHARACTER
Sow a CHARACTER and reap a DESTINY.’
And in his book, ‘Atomic Habits – Tiny Changes Remarkable Results’, James Clear flushes out this line of thinking. He describes its psychological underpinnings, and puts forward actionable strategies for creating or reinforcing good habits and discontinuing or minimizing unhelpful habits – a strategy for keeping New Year’s resolutions.
He uses the word ‘atomic’ in the sense of the very small – small cumulative changes that have large impacts, not attempting huge changes at one go.
Imagine your life is on a straight path from A to B a mile away. If every 3 feet you deviated just a quarter of an inch to your right, you would end up 36 feet to the right of where you were going. That’s the power of small changes.
Bad Habits Are Easier
The challenge is that good habits such as exercising daily are harder to maintain than bad habits because of the lag between the habit and the outcome or reward. For example, exercise leads to longer-term health but there is a lag between exercising and its long-term benefits showing up. Bad habits on the other hand tend to yield instant or near term gratification, although the longer term outcomes tend to be bad – such as in the case of smoking.
To illustrate how unconscious automated habits take hold, rats were conditioned to associate pressing a lever with being rewarded with cheese. Soon the rats began to associate the lever with cheese even when no cheese was provided.
This stimulus-response can be broken into 4 stages:
CUE (lever), CRAVING (for cheese), RESPONSE (press lever) REWARD (cheese)
The same continuous feedback loop is observed in humans and smoking.
CUE (stress), CRAVING (for cigarette), RESPONSE (light up) REWARD (relief)
Instant gratification works particularly well for bad habits, and that’s why they persist
Good Habits Need Help
Good habits need a little more help to take root. But there is a strategy for increasing the odds of persisting through the boring reps to get the longer-term benefits.
Rather than focusing exclusively on the long-term and far remote goal such as better health, focus more on the immediate processes that will get your there. For example, let your running shoe in obvious sight (rather than at the back of the closet) be the cue to get you out of the door. The first step is always the hardest, but the last mile is always the least crowded. Let the habit of process take hold. One action leads to another and another. This is what takes you to your goal.
The action plan is to instill routines or processes which becomes second nature. The 4 elements of the process are:
- Make it OBVIOUS
- Make it ATTRACTIVE
- Make it EASY
- Make it SATISFYING
1 Make the CUE OBVIOUS: Place little reminders in your environment. Pair a new habit with a specific time and location.
2 Create an ATTRACTIVE association with the CUE: Associate something you want to do with the action you need to do, e.g. I will have a warm shower after I exercise. The anticipation gives you a dopamine spike. Reframe your thinking from I “have” to exercise to I “get” to exercise.
3 Make the RESPONSE EASY: The key is repetition not perfection. Repeat the desired habit regularly. Start modestly e.g., I will walk for 10 minutes each day rather than I will walk for 30 minutes. Or in terms of process, think, “open my notes” rather than “study for class”.
4 Make the REWARD SATISFYING: The feeling of making progress is satisfying. Give yourself immediate rewards along the way. This can be as simple as placing a bead in a glass jar each time you perform the activity of a desired habit.
Once Good habits are automated, we tend to perform them easily without conscious effort. This is great energy saver. And contributes to building a base on which more good habits can be stacked.
Leveraging Good Habits – Getting Into Flow
Automated habits are the foundation for peak performance. You leverage the automatic habits by combining them with completely focussed conscious attention whenever you need peak performance. For example, the best basketball players would combine “muscle memory” with complete conscious attention to everything occurring on the court in every game each time they come out to perform.
However, to get on any field of play and excel, you have to find your niche by the experience of trying different activities. Each person has different propensities. To use a sport analogy, the natural attributes of a champion swimmer are not the same as those of an outstanding basketball player or a gymnast. Your niche is likely to be in the area of an activity that you enjoy but most other people consider work.
To maintain peak flow you have to continually challenge yourself. Showing up every day, day in and day out, is a huge part of winning the battle. It puts you in contention. This is the necessary groundwork that gets you started, but it is not sufficient by itself. Complacency and boredom have to be warded off. Once you are in your field of choice, the tasks you choose must be challenging enough to require you to perform cognitive functions for the task at the limit of your ability – not below your ability or far beyond your ability, but just far enough above your ability that you have to stretch. This combined with ingrained automated habits produces peak performance.
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