THE ATOMIC HABIT-II BY SURENDAR THAKUR
1. One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing. This helps explain why the consequences of bad habits can sneak up on us. To create your own, make a list of your daily habits as called the ‘The Atomic Habit’.
Once you have a full list, look at each behavior, and ask to yourself. Is this a good habit, a bad habit, or a neutral habit? If it is a good habit, write. The things you do in morning will give you to a particular habit will depend on your situation and your goals.
There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits. That is, effective at solving problems. All habits serve you in some way even the bad ones which is why you repeat them. Generally speaking, good habits will have net positive outcomes.
Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good. Habits that conflict with your desired identity are usually bad. As you create your habits scorecard, there is no need to change anything at first.
The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. With enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it. Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing. The process of behavior change always starts with awareness.
You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them. Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an urge to do the right things at the right time, even if you can’t say why.
The French Philosopher Denis Dermot lived nearly his entire life in poverty, but that all changed one day in 1765. Diderot’s daughter was about to be married and he could not afford to pay for the wedding.
Despite his lack of wealth, Diderot was well known for his role as the co-founder and writer of Encyclopedia, one of the most comprehensive encyclopedias of the time, When Catherine the, the Empress of Russia, heard of Diderot’s financial troubles, her heart went out to him. She was a book lover and greatly enjoyed his encyclopedia.
She offered to buy Diderot’s personal library for Diderot had money to spare. With his new wealth, he not only paid for the wedding but also acquired a scarlet robe for himself. Diderot’s scarlet robe was beautiful.
So beautiful, in fact, that he immediately noticed how out of place it seemed when surrounded by his more common possessions, slowly he decorated his home with expensive sculptures. When it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage.
One of the best ways to build new habits is to identify a current habit you already do each day and them stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.
Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location No matter how you use this strategy, the secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off.
If you are trying to add meditation into your morning routine but morning are chaotic and your kids keep running into the running, into the rooms, then that may be the wrong place and time. Consider when you are most likely to be sacksful. Don’t ask yourself to do a habit when you are likely to be occupied with something else.
Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our relationship to them. Think in terms of how you interact with the space around you. The good news is that you can train yourself to link a particular habit with a particular context.
When you can’t manage to get to an entirely new environment, redefine or rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for your work and study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is that one space and one use. If you can manage to stick with this strategy, each context will become associated with a particular habit and mode of thought.
Unlike an implementation intention, which specifically states the time and location for a given behavior, habit stacking implicitly has the time and location build into it. When and where you choose to insert a habit into your daily routine can make a big difference.
Your cue should also have the same frequency as your desired habit. If you want to do a habit every day, but you stack it on top of a habit that only happens on Monday, that’s not a good choice. Good habits always earn good things and bad habit always earns bad things.
2. Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you. The most powerful of all human sensory abilities, however, is vision. The human body has about eleven million sensory receptors. Approximately ten million of those are dedicated to sight.
How to Design Your Environment For Success. Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice and work often makes it easy not to do certain actions because there is no obvious cue to trigger the behavior. If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.
We mentally assign our habits to the locations in which they occurs the home, the office, the gym. Each location develops connections to certain habits and d routines.
Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over time. Make a cue of a good habit. It is easier to build new habits in a hew environment because you are not fighting against old cues. The practice is an inversion of the first law of behavior change. Self-control is a short term strategy, not a long term one.
You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to override your desires every time. Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do right things, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.
This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible. Habits are about dopamine, is skipping over major portions of the process. It is just one of the important role players in habit formation.
However, I will single out the dopamine circuit in this chapter because it provides a window into the biological underpinnings of desires, craving, and motivation that are behind every habit. Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategies are to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. New habits seem achievable when you see other doing them every day. If you are surrounded by fit people you are more likely to consider working out to be a common habit.
To make your habits even more attractive, you can take this strategy one step further to improve your own life. When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
The Atomic Habit Rules
Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige, and status. We want pins and medallions on our jackets. High status people enjoy the approval, respect, and praise of others. We are also motivated to avoid behaviors that would lower our status. We trim our hedges and mow our lawn because we don’t want to be the slob of the neighborhood.
So one of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join cultures where your desired behavior is the normal behavior and you already have something in common with the group.
3. Where Cravings Come From. Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying, motive; I often have a craving that goes something like this. I want to eat tacos. If you were to ask me why I want to eat tacos, I wouldn’t because I need food to survive. But the truth is somewhere deep down.
I motive is to obtain food and water even if my specific craving is for a taco. A craving is the sense that something is mission. It is the desire to change your internal state.
When the temperature falls, there is a gap between what your body is currently sensing and what it wants to be sensing. Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you and where you want to be in the future. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment.
When you binge eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience. Therefore habits are very important to do and make it perfect to generate and re-generate energy and will fulfil your needs in your life very prosperous.
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