Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, Produced by Sounds True. My Name Is Tami Simon, I'm the Founder of Sounds True, and I'd Love to Take a Moment to Introduce You to the New Sounds True Foundation. the Sounds

JC: So the phrase "atomic habits," I chose the word "atomic" for 3 reasons. The first one is exactly what you are mentioning here, so the first meaning of the word atomic is small or tiny, like an atom, right? The second meaning of the word atomic is "the fundamental unit in a larger system"—so like atoms build into molecules, molecules build into compounds, and so on. In a lot of ways, I feel like these small habits, that they are kind of like the atoms of our lives. So like, these little fundamental units that make up your larger daily routine. And then the third and final meaning is "the source of immense energy, or power, " and I think if you put all three of those together, you sort of understand the narrative arc of the book, and certainly the meaning of the title, which is if you make changes that are small and easy to do, and you layer them on top of each other, like units in a larger system, then you can end up with some really powerful, remarkable results in the long run.

TS: OK, and then the fourth law that you apply to establishing a good new habit is making it satisfying. How am I making this exercise satisfying?

JC: Right. So you can sort of think of any behavior or any habit as producing multiple outcomes across time. So, broadly speaking, we can say there is an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome. People often ask, like, "OK, if bad habits are bad for me, then why would I need them, right? If it's so bad, then why do I keep coming back to it?" And the answer is, all habits serve you in some way, and in the case of bad habits, it's often the case that the immediate outcome is actually kind of favorable. Like the immediate outcome of eating a donut is great. It's sweet, it's sugary, it's tasty. It's only the ultimate outcome if you keep doing that, for a year, or two years, or five, that is unfavorable. Same thing for smoking a cigarette. You know, the immediate outcome of smoking a cigarette is maybe you get to socialize with some friends outside of work, or you curb your nicotine craving. It's only the ultimate outcome, two or five or ten years down the line, that's unfavorable.

With good habits, it's often the reverse. Like, what is the reward for working out for a week? Not a whole lot—your body looks the same in the mirror at the end of the night, scale hasn't really changed. If anything, you might be sore. So the rewards of your good habits are often delayed, they accumulate much later, and this is one of the challenges, which is that the costs of your good habits are often in the present, and the costs of your bad habits are in the future. And because we have this—because we are wired to focus on the immediate outcome, we often seek the benefits the bad habits provide right now, and overlook the downsides they have in the long run.

So for good habits, what we need to do then, is we have these delayed rewards that we are trying to accumulate, so we have something in the present to make it feel like, "Hey, this is good, this is worthwhile, I should do this." Now the ultimate form of this is when doing the habit is an affirmation of your desired identity. So like literally, you could be in the middle of doing a squat or doing a pushup, even if you aren't consciously thinking this, it is reinforcing the idea that I am now the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, I finish what I start, all those good feelings that are affirming that identity that you want to have.

But the truth is, early on, most people don't feel that. The first time you go to the gym, you kind of feel uncertain, unsure, like you don't belong, so you need to show up consistently to build that identity up. And one way to do this is to use what psychologists refer to as a reinforcement device, or some kind of external reinforcer. So for example, for every five times you go to the gym, maybe you get to take a bubble bath to reward yourself. Or for every month that you don't miss a workout that is scheduled, then maybe you get to reward yourself by buying, I don’t know, maybe a new jacket or investing in something you enjoy.

And the key here is that you want to take a reward that doesn't conflict with your desired identity. Like if the identity you are trying to build is, "I don't miss workouts and I'm a healthy person," and then you reward yourself with each workout with a pint of ice cream, then you are casting votes that conflict. But if you reward yourself with a bubble bath, now it’s kind of like, "Hey, I’m casting another vote for taking care of my body, and ultimately that is what the workout is trying to move me toward anyway." So those external reinforcers can be good, provided that they are aligned with the type of person you want to become.

TS: Now, James, you mentioned towards the beginning of this conversation that there is a level of trial and error when it comes to, is this new habit really something that is going to deliver the joy and satisfaction I thought when I set out? So how do we know, when we are putting a new habit into action, whether or not it maybe just isn't all that rewarding? We thought it was going to be, but it's not. Like, OK, I've made my bed every day for a year, I did it, and at the end I thought, "You know, I don't actually feel like a more organized person, I don't actually care. It didn't do anything, didn't up my level of satisfaction in my life at all. It was a myth. Who cares about making the bed?" I'm just giving a ridiculous example for this point, but it might not make me feel anything, do you know? I thought it would, and I tried it, and it didn't. Or, how do you know, "Oh, you know, I'm a quitter. I quit, I just quit." How do we know the difference?

JC: Well, in the long run, I think this is why it is important to have a process of reflection and review. So for example, I do an annual review, each year. At the end of the year, I count up how many workouts I did, how many I did each month, how many new places I traveled to, how many articles I wrote, a variety of other things. And really what it is, it's less a chance to count perfectly, and more a chance to ask, "Hey, are my habits still serving me? Am I still moving in the direction I want?"

And then in the summer, six months later, I do what I call an integrity report, where I ask three questions. First question is, "What are my core values? " So, what are the principles I care about and try and live by? The second question is—you get to pat yourself on the back, it's, "How did I live by these values each year?" So, talking about the good stuff. And the third question is the most important one, which is, "How did I fail to live by these?" And it's a chance for you to ask yourself, "Are my habits aligning with the values I want? Are they making me happy, or reinforcing that desired identity, or helping me become the person I want to become?" So I think from a big picture view, it's nice—now, I'm not saying everybody has to do those two things, but it's nice to have at least some point when you check in and reflect, and ask yourself, "OK, are these things serving me?"

Now on the more granular basis, I think you often—you don't necessarily have to wait for every six months or every year to figure that out—but if you have a good measurement to track it. And this one is really challenging, because choosing the right form of measurement, it can actually be very hard. I mean, this happens all the time: people pick a form of measurement—like if we stick with the exercise example, they use the number on the scale. But then pretty soon, your weight becomes a signal for your self-worth and whether things are going well, and it's less about being a healthy person and more about just making the number on the scale move. Or in school, it just becomes about getting an A, and not about actually learning something. And that's the danger is that when the measurement becomes the target, it starts to cease to be a good measure, because you aren't really using it as a way to inform, "Oh, I'm moving in the right direction, I'm directionally accurate"; you are using it as the ultimate arbiter of, "Am I a good person or not," or "Am I making progress or not?"

If you are able to select the right form of measurement, then I think you can have a much better idea of whether that is moving you toward the thing you want to achieve. But the challenge of this is what we were mentioning earlier, which is we often don't quite know what we want. So it really requires a lot of self-awareness, and clarity, some time to think and reflect, "Is this actually what I'm trying to get?â€Â Then only once you understand what you are optimizing for, can you choose a measurement that tells you whether you are moving in the direction of that thing that you are trying to optimize.

TS: I'm really interested in this integrity report. I'm curious, when you fill it out, and you ask, "What are my core values?"—let's say the last time you filled it out, do you remember what you came up with?

JC: They don't change that much each year, but I do try to revisit the list and see if there is anything that is—you know, a new concept or quality that I want to add to it. I'm pulling up my most recent one here—the core values I had last time, I sort of broke them into four buckets, and then had questions underneath each one. The values were growth, self-respect, grit, and contribution, and then for each one I had a couple questions. Like for example for the contribution one, am I contributing to the world around me or am I just consuming from it? Am I somebody others can count on? Am I helping make things better for other people? It's not just about listing a value, because it's easy to say if it's just a word, but if you have to actually answer that question or sit with that for a little longer, then you have to get a little more clear about, are you actually doing some of these things?

TS: OK, let's go ahead and break a bad habit. So here is my confessional moment, James. I've been a nail biter my whole life. I've quit a couple times, and it's lasted for a few months, but it hasn't lasted that long. How can I use your model to break the nail-biting habit?

JC: Good question, OK. So, I'm going to use this as a way to walk through the model. I want to—hopefully people will be able to get broader principles out of this. Typically, for breaking a bad habit, really good places to intervene are that first and third stage, so in this case it would be to make it invisible or make it difficult. For biting your nails, that is a hard thing to do, because you can't really make your fingers invisible, they are always there, they are always on your hands. So that is one challenge. So blocking out the cue, removing your fingers, isn't really an option here, so you have to skip that one. Then we go to the second stage, make it unattractive. This is a little challenging too, and this is true for many bad habits, which is as soon as the thought arises, you have this craving to bite them—even if it's non-conscious, you are working on something and then maybe chewing the nail, or whatever.

What we are left with in this particular case are the last two stages. First stage, make it difficult. There are actually quite a few novel solutions here that you could do. I have one reader who told me that they learned to stop biting their nails by getting Invisalign. Because when they got Invisalign, you put the retainers on your teeth, and you actually cannot bite your nails, so it makes it very difficult to do so, you have to take it out every single time. And that adds enough friction to the task, that you go, "I don't want to do this, I'm not going to take the liner out and do this." So that makes it very difficult. A really extreme example would be, sometimes if kids are doing it, to like, keep gloves on or something like that, so you can't access the nail, but that is the same kind of principle—make it difficult, increase friction.

And then we have the fourth and final step, which is to make it unsatisfying. So, this is where you get some of those nail polishes that people will put on that taste terrible, and so by adding the nail polish, you are making it really gross and vomit-inducing to bite the nail. The hope here is that the cue will happen—you see your fingers, they are doing whatever it is where you usually bite your nail; the craving will still happen, you feel the urge to do it; and if you don't have Invisalign, or some other make-it-difficult strategy, then maybe you still bite your nail, but it tastes terrible, and the hope is that you can continue to learn, to train your brain, so that the next time around, you start to learn, "Oh this isn't serving me, I shouldn't do this anymore."

Now if you want take that strategy to an even more extreme level, then you can use—there is a little device, you may have head of it before, it's called the Pavlok, and it's a little wristband, it looks like a Fitbit or something, but you can program it to shock you, it provides a little electrical shock. It has an accelerometer in it, so it can actually track when you bring your fingers to your mouth. so you could imagine for example, wearing this thing between meals, and then anytime you bring your hands up like that you get a little buzz, and that reminds you not to do it; or in many cases, actually makes it very unsatisfying, because it's not fun to be shocked.

But those four strategies, that’s what you’re looking at, those are your options, your places to intervene, and I think in this case step three and step four are your best options.

TS: OK so once again, this brings me to the original question I asked about the inner change and outer change, and how they come together, or don't. There's nothing about what you just described that addresses the anxiety that might be happening inside, or what's going on that is driving the behavior—do you know what I mean? Because is it possible that, OK, I put some kind of chemical on my fingers and I don't bite my nails, but the thing inside that was scared, or childlike, that wants to put the fingers in the mouth, like a child; whatever that might be, that is still there, it's just going to come out in another way someplace. I haven't addressed the psychological level, that's my question.

JC: Yes, for sure. This is true of pretty much any habit. We go through life and we build habits, mostly to solve the problems of life with less energy or effort than we would otherwise need. So, you can imagine—for example, you mentioned the psychological needs. You might come home from work and feel stressed and exhausted, and one person solves that problem, so to speak, by smoking a cigarette, and another person does it by playing video games for an hour, and a third person does it by going for a run.

We can see that the range of ways to solve that underlying need are very wide, and some of them are healthy and productive, and some are unhealthy and unproductive. So in this case, not only would you want to eliminate the need to bite the nails, or the way in which you do it is to increase friction, et cetera, but also come up with a replacement habit that maybe serves that deeper psychological need.

This can—ultimately, what we are talking about here is changing the internal story you have around the behavior. I hesitate to say that as a first line of defense, because one, it sounds a little airy-fairy-foo-foo, like OK, just tell yourself a different story and then everything will be fine; but also because it is very much a long-term game to be able to do that, assuming that you don't have an epiphany.

You can sometimes have an epiphany; for example there is a reader that I mention in the book, he bit his nails for many years, and then through sheer will power he was able to not do it for a week or two, and his nails grew out. And then he went to get a manicure, and when he got it done, the person giving him the manicure said, "You know, aside from biting your nails, you actually have pretty healthy nails. They look nice." It was the first time that his fingers looked nice in a very long time, and so suddenly what happened—in his words at least—was that he had a new story to tell. He was able to take pride in how his nails looked.

This type of thing happens all the time with behavior change, or just behaviors that we stick to consistently. As soon as you start to take pride in a particular trait or aspect of your life, you are very committed to maintaining those habits. If people compliment you on your biceps, you never miss arm day at the gym. If they compliment you on how your hair looks, you buy all kind of hair products to take care of it. So finding a way to change that story and take pride in something that you previously feared, or felt shame or guilt about is one way to maintain that.

But I still think we are talking about two different things—like one is taking pride in the nails, and one is rectifying or using a replacement habit to resolve the psychological tension or stress, anxiety that was the root cause that that behavior was serving. This is what I finish Atomic Habits with; I say at the very end, the holy grail of habit change is not a single one percent improvement, it is a thousand of them. Ultimately, what we need if we are really committed to making changes in our lives, is a variety of small changes all layered on top of each other, and oriented toward the same single goal.

So in this case it may be true that you buy the Pavlok bracelet, and you put on the gross disgusting nail polish, and you invest in Invisalign for six months—and you start to ask some of those deeper questions, about what is the psychological tension that is driving me? What is the underlying stress I need to resolve in a healthier way? Can I find ways to develop some pride around how my nails look, and the health of my nails? If you can do, maybe not all those things, but maybe half, or four or five, then collectively that is a system of change that would maybe move you towards something more sustainable.

TS: Yes. I think that when you start talking about what's happening at the underlying level, that's when I get really interested. Because I think for example, with addiction, I've seen people change an addiction, drop an addiction, but what's driving them, it just shows up someplace else, do you know what I mean? Maybe they're proud, they have a great sense of their new identity as somebody who no longer does xyz, whatever it might be. But they still have an addictive personality, I mean it's still driving them. They haven't changed in a wholesale kind of way, just the exterior has changed.

JC: It's a tough thing. You see this a lot in the fitness industry that people who are really extreme on the fitness side, they are professional athletes, or body builders, or cross-fitters or nutritional coaches or whatever, they often have relatively kind of addictive personalities. So maybe before they struggled with a drug addiction, or an eating disorder, or something like that, and now they don't have that thing that they are struggling with anymore, but they are addicted to exercise to a certain degree, and that is what you are saying with it shows up somewhere else.

I don't know exactly how I feel about that. Because on the one hand, life is hard, and we have to find ways to cope, and I think we can roughly put behaviors into a couple different categories. You can imagine there are some categories of behavior that tend to default or skew toward a more negative side, for example taking meth or cocaine, defaults towards more addictive behaviors, more unhealthy outcomes. And then there are other behaviors that certainly, in the extreme can also be negative, like for example, becoming addicted to exercise, but generally speaking exercise defaults more to a productive, healthy outcome, certainly much more than taking substances.

I think often in life, life is not—you are never going to have a life that does not have problems, and so in many cases the quest for self-improvement is not to have a life that does not have problems, but to upgrade your problems. Partially I feel like those people should be praised for upgrading their problems, for making the advancement from a behavior that really wasn't serving them well to doing something that generally is a more positive influence on their life, even if it's not perfect. But there is still this deeper work to be done, to try to keep things within the lines, and to try to maintain a balanced and more holistic version of well-being so that you aren't always going off the rails with the thing that you happen to be investing in.

So I simultaneously think both of those are true, that it is important for us to do the deep work to that we can live a more balanced life, and also important to ask ourselves how can we upgrade our problems, and to have enough grace and forgiveness with ourselves to feel good about the fact that we are directionally moving forward, even if things aren't quite perfect yet.

TS: In the book Atomic Habits, you talk about these decisive moments that come up. I think that all of us know those moments—those moments could be where we've opened the refrigerator, and we're like, "Hmm, what should I do? I'm not really hungry, but I want something." Or it could be something much more of a decisive moment related to a habit that's really important to our integrity as a person, but we know we are in a choice point. What do you have to say that will help us make the choice that we are going to be glad we made when we do our review six months later?

JC: To unpack this idea a little further, it's sort of like throughout your day you face these forks in the road. An example is my wife gets home from work at 5:15, and either we change into our workout clothes and we go to the gym, or we sit on the couch and eat Indian food and watch reruns of The Office. And both of those nights are good nights, but they are very different, and the thing that determines what happens in that two-hour block of time is do we change into our workout clothes or not? So I think that is the first question you could ask, is walk back the behavioral chain, and try to figure out when does that moment occur, when does that fork in the road occur, and try to optimize for that. Because really what that tells us is that we don't have to optimize for the two-hour workout, or driving to the gym, or all this other stuff that happens—we can kind of let that be if we just try to optimize for changing into our workout clothes.

Once you figure out what that decisive moment looks like, what choice is made in that moment, then you can start to organize the rest of your day around it. So we can do things like prime the environment to make it easy—maybe the night before, we set out our workout clothes and our gym bag and our water bottle and all that is set up so that when we open the door at 5:15, that's a very easy choice to make. Or maybe we, as I mentioned before, maybe text a friend and commit to meeting them at the gym at 5:30, and so now we have got a little social proof nudging us along. And there are a variety of examples too, but the idea is that once you figure out the true thing that starts that behavioral chain, then you can start to organize around that little moment, that little fork in the road, rather than worrying about the whole routine.

TS: Ok. Well, what about a decisive moment that many of us face, which is just going to a restaurant, and figuring out what we are going to order when we are in the restaurant—you know, it's a decisive moment. Do I get the risotto, or do I get the salad?

JC: Yes. There are a bunch of things you can do here, all the strategies we have talked about so far are still part of it. It could be an identity shift; for example you could say, if you are focused on becoming a vegan or a vegetarian then you could identify as "I'm the type of person that doesn't eat meat," and then that starts to cut down the menu options. Or you could look at, I just mentioned, priming the environment with setting your stuff out beforehand. You could look at the menu before you arrive and select something then, when you're not in the throes of the peer pressure of the group and what people are getting. So you have pre-decided, makes it a little easier for yourself. Another thing you could do is you could just say, "You know what? I'm going to order whatever I want, but I'm going to use a strategy that locks in how much food I'm going to eat." So for example, I do this sometimes, if I want to cut down on the amount of calories I have, then I'll ask the waiter or waitress to box up half the meal before they serve it to me. If I waited until they brought it out, and then I was like, "Oh, I'll just eat half," that would never work.

So there are a variety of strategies—from locking in the behavior beforehand, to identifying as a particular type of person to cut down on the options, to selecting it before you show up, but any of those can help with that choice in the moment.

TS: OK, James, I'm going to ask you a couple more personal questions. What's been the hardest habit you've ever broken or tried to break? Maybe you haven't been successful?

JC: Yes, for sure. You know, I say this a lot: that my readers and I are peers, and we go through this together, and I struggle with all the same things that everybody else struggles with. My publisher told me when I was handing in Atomic Habits, she was like, "We write the books we need." And I felt that a lot, like I'm just trying to figure it out too.

I don't know if it's the hardest one I've ever had to break, or struggled breaking, but it's one that I still struggle with, which is, for lack of a better term, a power-down routine. So I have this rule for myself where I don't cheat myself on sleep, so I try to get eight or nine hours each night, especially if I'm training heavy in the gym. But I kind of get this second wind around 9:00 or 10:00, and its just like "Ah, maybe I'll check email for a minute," or "Maybe I'll work on that chapter for a second." And of course, it's never just a minute, and 9:00 or 10:00 turns into midnight or 1:00, and if I go to bed at 1:00, well now I'm facing this trade off, where OK, do I get eight hours of sleep, or do I wake up earlier, because I tend to do better work earlier in the morning? And I always choose the sleep, but it always bothers me that I haven't figured out how to master that behavior.

Similar to what I just mentioned, walk back the behavioral chain. If I ask myself that line of questioning, I start to realize, "OK, what's the problem? Well, the problem is I'm going to bed at 1:00. OK, why am I going to bed at 1:00? Well, because I stayed up late answering email. Well, why am I staying up late answering email? Well, because I have trouble shutting down and I checked it again at 9:00."

And then you start to realize OK, the real problem isn't that I go to bed late, it's that I check my email after the workday is over, and then that reveals a different habit that you need to focus on. The truth is I've thought a lot about my sleep habits, but I probably haven't thought that much about my email habits, and so maybe that is an area where I need to focus.

TS: Have you tried making it very unsatisfying by getting an accountability partner, like your wife, to make sure you don't check your email before you go to bed? I'm just kind of joking with you, James. [Laughs]

JC: It's a good question! [Laughs] She has better habit than I do, so I've learned a lot from her, and she is definitely a force for good in my life, but that's not one that we've figured out yet.

TS: OK, just two final questions. One, people often ask, how many days does it take to form a new habit, you know those whole, "It takes 40 days, just like it was 40 days crossing the desert." Is there any science to defend that, or is that just something people have come up with?

JC: Good one. I