This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Atomic Habits" by James Clear. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is the most important factor in building habits that stick? What can you do to persevere with a new behavior even when you are not motivated to do it?
According to James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, the key to building habits that stick is twofold. First, be prepared to push through boredom and lack of motivation. Second, make the new habits more attractive and stimulating
Read on for tips on building habits that stick.
Building Habits That Stick
When it comes to building habits, motivation will not keep you going for long. Losing motivation is one of the biggest killers of habit formation. You lose motivation for several reasons, including choosing the wrong habits to start, not seeing progress fast enough, and failing to allow small changes to lead to others. However, one of the biggest killers of motivation is boredom.
To really succeed at building habits that stick, you must accept that boredom is inevitable. You must also acknowledge that feeling bored doesn’t mean the behavior is no longer valid.
How to Combat Boredom
Learning how to stay motivated means building habits that draw you in, rather than repel you. One of the best-known strategies for keeping behaviors interesting is working at a level of just manageable difficulty.
Your brain loves a challenge, but this love is fickle. If the challenge is not hard enough, you will lose interest. If the challenge is too hard, you will be unsuccessful in your behavior attempts and shy away from trying.
- Playing tennis against a 5-year-old will be too easy and lead to boredom.
- Playing tennis against Serena Williams will be way too hard and certainly lead to failure. (If not, you may have a Grand Slam championship in your future!)
- Either extreme will not help you engage with the activity or behavior.
The perfect degree of challenge for the brain is when you perform at a level that lives on the edge of your current abilities. This idea is referred to as the Goldilocks Rule, which states that degrees of difficulty must be just right to attain peak motivation.
How to Make the Right Behaviors Attractive
There are many different ways to address the underlying motivations of behavior, and your current methods may not be the best ones. The habits you have now are merely the behaviors the brain latched onto because of dopamine stimulation when rewards were experienced. To make behaviors more attractive and create new cravings, you can manipulate your thoughts and actions.
Supernormal Stimuli and Temptation Bundling
The more attractive and stimulating an experience, the more you will crave it. Unfortunately, building healthy habits (like exercising or eating more vegetables) don’t trigger strong cravings. The solution to this is to bundle the new habit with something you already want. This is called temptation bundling.
Temptation bundling creates a supernormal stimuli—a heightened version of reality that elicits stronger-than-normal responses.
- For example, an engineer loved binge-watching Netflix but also knew he should get more exercise. He used his knowledge to manipulate the functions of a stationary bike and the Netflix app. In order to watch Netflix, he had to ride the bike and keep a certain pace. If the pace decreased, the streaming stopped.
- By creating a connection between his craving to watch Netflix with his desire to exercise more, he made the act of exercising more attractive.
Temptation bundling can also be used with habit stacking. The formula is as follows: “After X [current habit], I will do Y [new habit]. After I do Y, I get to do Z [craved habit].”
- You’ve already stacked your need to exercise more on top of your current habit of eating lunch. But you also want to play video games. Your formula changes from: “After I finish lunch, I will walk around the block for 20 minutes” to “After I finish lunch, I will walk around the block for 20 minutes. After I walk around the block for 20 minutes, I get to play video games for 30 minutes.”
- If playing video games becomes the reward for walking, you’ve created a supernormal stimulus by making exercise more rewarding. You’ll begin to crave the walk so you can claim your reward afterward.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of James Clear's "Atomic Habits" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Atomic Habits summary :
- The 4 Stages of Habit Formation you can use to transform your life
- How more than half of your daily actions are automatic
- Why some habits stick and why others won't
