Book SummaryThe Master Guides: Changing Your Habits, by Shortform

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Master Guides: Changing Your Habits

At least 40% to 50% of the things you do and the decisions you make every day are driven by habit. Thus, even small improvements in your habits can have a big impact on your productivity and quality of life. Like many people, you may have bad habits you’d like to break, good habits you’d like to start, or just routine habits you’d like to tweak for better health or productivity.

But it’s hard to change your habits if you don’t know how they form in the first place, what they’re made...

The Master Guides: Changing Your Habits Summary The Science Behind Habits

There are two primary models for understanding habits and how they form. With minor variations, most authors (Clear, Duhigg, Eyal, and Oakley) describe habits in the same way, which we’ll call the Standard Model. Meanwhile, in Tiny Habits, Stanford behavioral scientist BJ Fogg presents the Fogg Behavior Model, a different approach to understanding habits. The two models tend to complement rather than conflict with each other.

The Standard Model

A habit is something you do without thinking because the behavior is programmed into your brain as an automatic response. There are several components to this biological “program”: the cue, the routine, the reward, the craving, repetition, and the belief.

The Cue

The cue is what starts the automatic program running in your brain. Cues are also called “prompts” or “triggers.” They can be either external (something in your environment) or internal (your thoughts or emotions). For example, say you have a habit of drinking coffee in the morning. This habit might have an external cue, such as the smell of coffee from other coffee drinkers in the office. Or it might have an...

The Master Guides: Changing Your Habits Summary Techniques for Changing Your Habits

Different authors suggest different methods for cultivating good habits and breaking bad ones. We’ll discuss them in turn, compare them, and consider how they can be combined for maximum effectiveness.

Fogg’s Methods

BJ Fogg observes that your motivation, especially your motivation to change, tends to fluctuate over time and is difficult to control. Thus, applying his behavioral model, he recommends changing your behavior by manipulating your ability rather than your motivation.

So, if you want to start doing something regularly, find a way to make it so easy that you’ll always do it. For example, if you want to start working out regularly, maybe you begin with a workout routine that consists of doing one sit-up. As this behavior becomes ingrained and thus easier, you can expand your workout.

Similarly, if you want to stop doing something, try to make it harder to do. For example, if you want to quit eating junk food, start by throwing out all the junk food in your house. Then plan your route through the grocery store so that you would have to go out of your way to pick up any more...

Shortform Exercise: Design a New Habit

In this exercise, you’ll think through what you could do to create a positive new habit using the techniques we discussed in the guide.

Briefly describe a behavior that you would like to make habitual.

Shortform Exercise: Change an Existing Habit

In this exercise, you’ll think through what you could do to change a habit you already have for the better using the techniques we discussed in the guide.

Briefly describe a habit you already have that you would like to change. What is the habit routine (the behavior), and what do you want to change about it? For example, maybe you have a habit of sitting in bed and browsing social media for a long time before you go to sleep. Maybe you just want to quit browsing social media in bed, or maybe you want to substitute something else, like reading a book for half an hour each night.