I just finished reading ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. One of the best books I have read in recent times. Lots of practical take away which we can start incorporating in our daily lives. In this article, I am going to summarise my learnings and how I am incorporating it into my life. Since there are lots of points to cover, I have decided to write it as a 2-part series.

Habits are double-edged swords. Bad habits can cut you up just as easily as good habits can build you up. Binge-watching a TV show is the easiest thing to do but reading a book needs effort and focus. That’s why most of the time we drift towards the easy options and end up building bad habits.

In this first article, I am going to cover how we can avoid/break bad habits.

For example, If you want to lose weight, most of us will plan to do exercise, yoga, jogging, eating healthy food, etc. These are all good habits. If you apply the Inversion Principle and ask yourself the question, why I am unhealthy now? Is it because I eat too much junk food or late-night snacks or eating too many sweets and dessert, lack of physical activity, etc. STOP doing them. Instead of adding good habits, cut down your bad habits which help you to achieve your objective of being healthy, losing weight.

So, how can we avoid actions which result in poor choices? I would like to share 3 tricks I tried recently and how it helped me.

Motivation is Overrated; Environment defines our behavior

Since the lockdown, the way we work has changed completely. My routine is, I get ready and setup up my laptop in the dining table by 10 AM. I usually go to the kitchen to drink water, just to make sure I get out of my chair every 1 hour. In our kitchen, snacks like chips, cookies usually lie around, and I always end up grabbing some of them whenever I go there to drink water. Now, when I entered the kitchen, I was not hungry and I had no intention of eating any snacks, but still, I ended up eating these unhealthy snacks. The only reason why I ate them because I can see them every time I walk into the kitchen. That visual cue influenced me to eat these snacks unconsciously. If they are hidden in the kitchen shelf, I wouldn’t even have noticed them, and I would have drunk water and came back to work. Now I have removed all these snacks from the kitchen and hidden them behind the shelves and have kept almonds, cashews in that place. This simple trick helped me to start eating healthy snacks instead of junk food.

The environment is an invisible hand that defines our behavior. We often make choices not because of what they are, but because of where they are. The more obvious a product or service, the more likely we are going to try it.

Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.

Many of the actions we take each day are not driven by purposeful drive/motivation but by the most obvious option.

Increase the friction to stop bad habits

The best way to break a bad habit is to make it difficult to do. I had this habit of randomly browsing twitter while lying in bed at night and end up sleeping late. Also, when I wake up, I usually check my WhatsApp messages and emails first thing. Sometimes I end up seeing messages which completely spoil my mood. When I start a day like that, it had that cascading effect on an entire day. The core problem here is taking my mobile to bed. It made me sleep late and start my mornings in a bad mood. So, what I did is, I kept my mobile far away on the TV stand before going to bed. Once I get into bed, it will be difficult for me to get out of bed and check the phone. Also, in the morning, I ended up seeing the phone after finishing my morning rituals of Yoga and meditation. This simple trick helped me to sleep early and start my day positively.

One more example. Recently I observed that I am spending too much time on Twitter and Instagram. I tell myself that I am taking a break from work by randomly browsing these apps. I realized I am wasting too much time because of this. So, this is what I did to stop this habit. I have decided to delete these 2 apps on every Sunday night and reinstall them again on Friday night. So, my weekdays are not affected by wasting time by random browsing and I can use the weekend to catch up on whatever I missed during weekdays. I tried this for a couple of weeks, it worked like a charm. Now my weekdays are more productive without any distraction.

Another bad habit. Another trick helped to break it.

The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.

In the next article, will see what hacks I have tried to build good habits….