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- [00:01]
A
Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing how to build a healthy habit. Making changes to our lifestyle can be hard. Our behaviors are often hardwired, ingrained into a regular routine that's reluctant to budge. So what can I do to make a new habit stick? Or Author of Atomic Habits, James Clear is here to tackle this question. He has four simple steps that will significantly increase your chance of success.
- [00:39]
B
If you want to build a good habit, there are four things you can do. The first thing is you want to make it obvious. So you want the cues of your good habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see, easier it is to get your attention, the more likely you are to act on it. The second law is to make it attractive. The more attractive or appealing a habit is, the more motivating or enticing it is, the more likely you are to feel compelled to do it. The third law is to make it easy. The easier, more convenient, frictionless, simple a habit is, the more likely it is to be performed. And then the fourth and final law is to make it satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable a habit is. Just like we were talking about a minute ago, whatever you feel like is rewarding or pleasurable, the more likely you are to repeat in the future. So make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. Now, there are many ways to do each of those things, and Atomic Habits covers that in greater detail. And we'll talk about some examples here in a minute. There are many ways to do those different things, but if you're sitting there and you're listening to this and you're thinking, you know, I have this habit I just keep. Like, I want to get started, but I keep procrastinating on it. Or maybe you're like, you know, I have this behavior. I do it every now and then, but I wish I did it more consistently. You can just go through those four laws and ask yourself, how can I make the behavior more obvious? How can I make it more attractive? How can I make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying? And the answers to those questions will reveal different steps that you can take to increase the odds that the behavior is going to occur. You don't always need all four, but the more of them that you have working for you, the better positioned you are to follow through on a good habit. Now, we can use that framework to talk about building better eating habits. And that can be helpful because Good habits can sort of like a plant crowding out another one. A good habit can kind of crowd out some of your bad habits. It creates less space for those to kind of exist and be repeated. So that's a really effective place to start. Of course, many people are also interested in how do I break a bad habit? And so to break a bad habit, you just inverted those four. So rather than making it obvious, make it invisible. Unsubscribe from emails, don't keep junk food in the house. If you're trying to follow a new diet, don't follow a bunch of food bloggers on Instagram. You know, like, reduce exposure to the queue. Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. Rather than making it easy, make it difficult. So increase friction, add steps between you and the behavior. And then rather than making it satisfying, make it unsatisfying. Layer on some kind of cost or consequence to the action. So to build a good habit, make it obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying. To break a bad habit, make it invisible, unattractive, difficult, unsatisfying. And again, there are many ways to do each of those things, but that's like the big picture framework to keep in mind.
- [03:24]
A
Thank you, James. I would love to dig into each of those in turn just to make sure that I and the listeners understand it a bit more. So could we maybe start with the first one? You said, make it obvious. So imagine someone's listening here and saying, like, I want to go and make these changes to what I'm using. What does make it obvious mean?
- [03:39]
B
So it's mostly about how you structure your environment. And I think a simple question to hold in the back of your mind, just, like, think about one habit that you're trying to build. Maybe it's a certain type of food you're hoping to eat more of, or, you know, something you're hoping to do. Maybe you just want to cook more meals or something like that. And then walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day at your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom. Look around those rooms and just ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage? What behaviors are obvious here? What behaviors are easy here? And, you know, if you walk into one person's house and the chips and the cookies and snacks are on the counter and visible and easy to get to, and you walk into another person's house and those things are either tucked away, maybe some of them aren't even in the house, or they're, you know, on the highest shelf in the back of the pantry, and they're harder to get to, and they've got, you know, a piece of fruit out on the counter. Individually, these are small choices, and no single one of them is going to radically transform your behavior. You're not just going to be able to put an apple on the counter and magically be. Become a healthy person. But collectively you can make a dozen or two dozen or 50 little adjustments like that. And the more that the good habit is the path of least resistance, and the more that the bad habit is distanced from you and has many steps or is higher friction, the more likely you are to fall through on the thing that you want to do. And I think this is just true about many habits in general, which is people often say something's important to them, but then you will look around the spaces where they live and work each day, and the room is not optimized for that thing. And so the more that you can prime your environment to make the next action easy, whether that's cooking the next meal instead of purchasing it, or whether that's eating something healthy rather than eating something unhealthy and so on, the more likely you are to be able to follow through on those things. And when you have energy and time and extra capacity, maybe you make whatever choice you want. But when you're pressed for time or you're stressed or you're exhausted, you're tired, what are you going to choose? You're going to choose the path of least resistance. And so redesigning your environment is a really effective way to promote some of those healthy behaviors. And one of the reasons why I love starting with environment design is because it's something that's very controllable, it's very tangible, and often you can do it once and it will continue to serve you again and again.
- [05:58]
A
So it's sort of resetting your default, if you like, as a result of this, because your environment has changed. Just your. Your sort of easy path of behavior has. Has adjusted as a. As a result of this.
- [06:09]
B
I think that's a good way to describe it. There's a chapter in Atomic Habits that's called the Secret to Self Control. And one of the surprising things about a lot of the research around self control and willpower is that when you look at someone and you're like, oh, I just wish I had the discipline they had, or I wish I had as much willpower as they have. What a lot of the studies have found is that these people are not necessarily, like, superhuman. Certainly there may be some variances and willpower between people but to a large degree, the people who exhibit the greatest willpower are the ones who are tempted the least. And so it's actually designing an environment that tempts you less, that positions you to make good choices by making those obvious and easy. That is the best way to increase your willpower. And that, I always think, is something that's very in your control.
- [06:55]
A
It's funny, I'm listening to this and thinking, I've got this massive tin of nuts here. Which is one of the things that at Zoe we are very, very pro, because the science behind nuts almost for the vast majority of people is incredibly good. And so I'm a big snacker. It's really effortless because it's just sitting there. And as you quite rightly said, well, it's a lot less effort, I'm sitting on my coals and the rest of it to do that than to go and try and eat something that is in fact less healthy. So that would be an example. It's like, it's obvious right there. I see it in front of me.
- [07:27]
B
To give an example that pretty much everyone can resonate with, think about your smartphone. So when I. I'm like everybody else, when my phone is next to me, I will check it every three minutes just because it's there. But I have a little rule for myself and I can't do it all the time, but I probably do it about 70% of the time, which is I leave my phone in another room until lunch. And I have a home office and so it's only like 30 seconds away. I just gotta walk down the stairs and go get it. But I never go get it. And I always think that's interesting. I'm like, did I want it or not? You know, in the one sense, I wanted it bad enough that I would check it every three minutes when it was next to me. But in another sense, I never wanted it so bad that I would work 30 seconds for it. And you'd be surprised how many habits are kind of like that. They will curtail themselves to the desired degree if you just introduce a little bit of friction. I've noticed that I'm that way about beer as well. If I buy a six pack of beer and I put it in the front of the fridge and it's just like in the door, I can see it as soon as I open it, I'll grab one and have it with dinner just cause it's there. But if I put it like down at the back of the fridge, like on the lowest shelf, And I kind of bent need to bend all the way down to see it. Sometimes I'll forget that it's there. It'll be there for two weeks or three weeks. I won't even remember that we have it. And so again, just optimizing your environment to make the good actions obvious and the undesirable actions less obvious or less easy to do. It sounds simple. But if you can do that in a dozen or two dozen or 50 different ways, you often find that it's much easier to stick to the behaviors that you want to stick to.
- [08:58]
A
James, can I ask you something a little controversial on this? One of my other guests said that, in fact, therefore, the biggest thing that you could do to really change your long term lifestyle and health was to change your friends. Because they are the biggest driver, in fact, of your environment and what you do. And therefore, if your friends, like don't do any exercise, eat really badly, all of these sorts of things, that's what you do with them. Whereas, you know, if your friends like to go for like walks or whatever, then in fact you go and do this different. Like, does that count within your, like change your environment, make it obvious, or is that a bit too radical for you?
- [09:35]
B
Yeah. So certainly I don't, I don't know about saying it's the biggest thing. I don't, I don't even know that it's possible to measure that or that you could even say that.
- [09:43]
A
You know, I don't think he had a clinical study to prove it to be fair.
- [09:47]
B
Sure. And the, and the biggest, you know, the biggest is going to change based on the situation, to have it and all kinds of other things. But I, setting that aside, I think we can say certainly it is a major element or a large factor in driving your habits. And it's not just your friends, though. It's also just if we more broadly think about, so we've been talking about the physical environment. If we just more broadly think about the social environment that you are in that is an enormous driver of your habits and behavior. We are all part of multiple groups. Some of those groups are large, like what it means to be British or what it means to be American or something like that. Some of those groups are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of your little friend group or a, you know, a member of the local CrossFit gym, whatever it is, like those groups that we all belong to, large and small, have a set of shared expectations, a set of social norms for what you do when you're in that group. And when habits go with the grain of the expectations of the group, they're pretty attractive. And this actually leads us to the second law that I mentioned. Make it attractive. So habits are really attractive when they help you fit in with the friends and the family and the relationships that you have around you. When they go against the grain of the expectations of the group, they're kind of unattractive. And so this comes back to one of the deepest human needs that we all have, which is this desire to bond and connect. You know, humans are very social creatures, and even if it's just like your little family unit, we all want to be a part of something. And so if people have to choose between, you know, I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, I belong, I'm part of something. Or I have the habits that I want to have, but I'm cast out. I'm ostracized, I'm criticized. You might be able to do that for a day or a week or, I don't know, a month or two. But at some point, it does not feel good to run against the grain of all the relationships in your life. And so the desire to belong will often overpower the desire to improve.
- [11:49]
A
That's it for today's recap. If you want to continue your health journey with Zoe, why not try our membership? Zoe is your daily coach to better health for life. Click the link in the show notes to get started today. And don't forget to follow Zoe, science and nutrition and your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. See you next time. O.