![]() ![]() While Clear appropriately has a chapter devoted to the struggle of habit change, it is surprisingly devoid of personal experience with struggle. One thing I didn’t like about the book was that it sometimes made habit change sound a bit too easy. My habit of resisting admitting when I am wrong is pretty engrained, so I can’t let this review go without some critique. So, am I ready to declare myself officially wrong to be skeptical about Atomic Habits? Not so fast. ![]() And I am definitely going to use some of Clear’s advice to address my current struggle of watching too much Netflix before bedtime. As I have written before, I heartily agree with this approach and have experienced its benefits in my own life when I attempted to start exercising, lose weight, or cut down on my alcohol consumption. At the heart of Clear’s advice is the fundamental idea that discipline and willpower aren’t the way to change habits, but instead processes, routines, and supports are how to do it. By offering this system and strategies to support habit change at each phase, Clear’s process is a practical, logical, but also self-compassionate way of cutting through the inner resistance, doubt, and angst that goes along with any effort to change one’s habits. To address this, Clear distills the process of habit creation into a succinct set of 4 laws: (1) make it obvious (2) make it attractive (3) make it easy and (4) make it satisfying. Undoing that process for habits we want to change, therefore, can seem confusing, daunting, and even futile. As Clear explains, habits are incredibly powerful because, for a behavior to become a habit, we have to accept it as part of our identity and then practice it and hard-wire it into our brains. Anyone caught in the snare of a bad habit knows that it can feel overwhelming and rob us of any motivation to change. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Clear’s book, though, is that it offers a much-needed structure to those of us who want to review and change our habits. Though he often supports his conclusions with scientific studies, he explains them with examples that most of us would recognize from popular culture or our own lives. He writes in plain English and a conversational tone. It’s short and has crisp, concise chapters broken up into bite-sized pieces. But, it’s January and I’m thinking about my habits like many people as we move all too slowly out of this global pandemic, so I decided to give it a shot.Īfter a few chapters, I immediately understood why people love Atomic Habits: it offers clear, concise procedural steps for building better habits and ending undesired ones. I heard so many enthusiastic reviews that my inner rebel/cynic thought it must be too good to be true. I admit, though, that I was just a little bit skeptical because I kept hearing, over and over again, about James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I knew that habits were important and I understand that even tiny habits could, over time, have huge consequences for one’s life. So, I was not at all skeptical when I heard about James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Nearly a decade after my meditation practice started, my life is much improved and it’s largely because of some habit changes. ![]()
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