The Secret to Change: How Small Habits Create Big Results
When you think of New Year’s Resolutions, which word comes to mind: Success or Failure?
I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s failure. Think about it: At the end of the year, we have this tradition to go against the grain of what we feel comfortable with and to vow that we’ll make a huge decision that will completely change our lives.
Let’s say you’re the 30-50% of people who make New Year’s Resolutions and decide that you want to lose weight?
It goes great at first! January 1st rolls around and you’re feeling strong. You decide to start bold: A breakfast of white chicken-meat with a little salt and pepper, a scoop of cottage cheese on the side, and a stalk of steamed broccoli. Yum!
This is easy for you! You promise yourself that seven days out of the week, you’ll get at least 10,000 steps in. You also promise yourself that you’ll go to the gym four days out the week.
A week goes by, and you weight yourself. Guess what?
You lost three pounds! Congrats!
Feeling good about yourself and your progress, you stay on the ball; only bland meals with little seasoning and cardio up the whazoo for you. Summer body, here we come!
Next week, you weight yourself again.
Two pounds!
Not as much as last time, but still going strong. You stick with the brutal diet. You stick with the 10k steps per day that make your feet sweat like you’ve been sitting in the hot sun for three hours. You stick with kicking your “you-know-what” at the gym.
What could possibly go wrong?
Week three: Time for another weight-in.
You step on the scale, your pallet deprived of any enjoyable food and your poor feet swollen to the size of two small cantaloupes.
The scale is calculating, calculating, and… no change.
Dumbfounded, you begin to wonder where it all went wrong. Did I not torture myself enough? Did I eat an extra ounce of dried out chicken breast when I shouldn’t of?
This is what we call hitting the “proverbial brick wall.” You’ve tortured yourself for another week with no change. This is where your motivation starts to falter.
You begin to start skipping days you go for those long walks. There’s some days you do, but it’s not the seven days you promised yourself.
After another day of banging your head against the microwave while heating up your twelve ounces of dried chicken breast and cauliflower, driving home from work, you smell something… McDonald’s.
Like a moth to a flame, you roll your minivan through the drive-thru and get two McChicken’s, a medium fry, and a crisp Coca-Cola on the side.
You scarf it down, only to feel like doodoo afterwards. You go home, ponder over your “poor” decision, cry yourself to sleep, and do it all again the next day. Rinse and repeat.
Can you guess where this is going? Do you think this person is going to get to their goal weight?
Like I said earlier, those who make New Year’s Resolutions, 30-50% of them are revolved around losing weight and getting fit.
Out of those that resolve to finally get their beach body, it is estimated that 5-9% of them actually do.
Your story may not be this extreme or dramatized, but you most likely can empathize with the frustration.
This person will fail because their strategy is based on one extremely overrated word: Motivation.
When we think about making big changes in our lives, Motivation can be good, but it’s flawed: It’s not sustainable. Instead of directing our attention to the Motivation and then starting to change our lives, we should direct it to another word: Habits.
It is estimated that 40-50% of all the actions we perform throughout our day are out of habit. I don’t know about you, but to me that’s insane to think about.
It’s good to have motivation, but it’s infinitely better to know how to build good habits and get rid of bad ones.
Over the next several blog posts, we will be delving into the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. Clear is an author and speaker on habits and decision-making, and his work is used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and the MBL.
We will use the tools given to us by Clear and tie it specifically to weight loss.
Let’s get started.
The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits
Like we’ve discussed, not only are New Year’s Resolutions flawed on the principle of basing them around Motivation, but they’re also flawed based on making earth-shattering changes overnight. Meanwhile, Atomic Habits is about making very small changes over a period of time to compound into something extraordinary.
Let’s define what Atomic Habits are; we’ll use the definitions given at the beginning of Clear’s book:
Atomic
An extremely small amount of a thing; The single irreducible unit of a larger system.
The source of immense energy or power.
Habit
A Routine or practice performed regularly; An automatic response to a specific situation.
Taking the word Habit, its definition gives us the key: “An automatic response to a specific situation.” If we can build Habits to lead healthier lives, we end up not having to think about it; it becomes automatic and second-hand nature to us!
Now let’s take the word Atomic. It seems like the two definitions are antitheses of another: The first definition is talking about “An extremely small amount of a thing,” but then the second definition talks about “The source of immense energy or power.”
That is because it’s not through earth-shattering changes in our lives that we make true change; it’s through small changes. The source of our own immense power is through small changes.
The premise of the book is based around these small changes. Here’s the general theme, make sure to log this in your memory-bank: True change is from making 1% changes over the long-term.
Over the long-term, a 1% change drastically compounds. If you get 1% better each day, you’ll be 37 times better by the end of the year than you were when you started. Conversely, if you get 1% worse each day, your total “change” will be at nearly zero.
This may be a tough pill to swallow because we want things quick, but it’s true.
On the positive side, we can look at our current habits as a trajectory for where we’ll be. If you’re someone who starts by walking 3000 steps per day, your trajectory is someone who’s healthy. If you consistently eat a serving of vegetables per day, your trajectory is someone who’s healthy. On the reverse, if you’re someone who pounds half a family-sized bag of Lay’s Wavy potato chips in a sitting, your trajectory is someone who’s unhealthy.
Here’s an example from the book of what change is really like:
You have an ice cube sitting in the middle of a room. But the room’s cold; it’s at twenty-six degrees, so the ice cube doesn’t melt.
You make a 1% change and bump up the temperature to twenty-seven degrees. It’s a difference, but the ice cube doesn’t change. But you keep on making these small changes.
Twenty-eight degrees.
Twenty-nine degrees.
Thirty degrees.
Thirty-one degrees.
As you’ve probably guessed, you hit thirty-two degrees and the ice cube begins to melt. Through a series of small, consistent, 1% changes, you go from no change to making a significant difference.
This is hard for people to accept because we want things quickly. Even though your habits are a projection of where you’ll end up, when we start a change and don’t see the results we want, we tend to not stick with it.
Having the goal of weight-loss is good, but don’t focus on the goal: Focus on the system.
What do I mean by that? If you do things that a healthy person does, you will become a healthy person. Small change is important, but if you can sustainably go for those walks, get that resistance training in, and adjust your nutrition, you will become someone that’s healthy.
How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)
Our Identities play a huge influence on who we are. If we consciously/subconsciously identify as a type of person and try to perform actions that that type of person wouldn’t do, it’s like we’re trying to push a boulder up a hill. It’s not sustainable.
Three Layers of Behavior Change
Take a look at the image above. It almost looks like the layers of an onion, doesn’t it? This is an illustration I took from the book; I think it’s very useful in demonstrating what we mean by Identity when it comes to behavior change.
Outcomes - The outer and most superficial layer, this is concerned with changing your results. An example for weight loss: “I want to weigh 30lbs lighter.”
Processes - The middle layer, this one is concerned with changing your habits and systems. Another example: “I’m going to go the gym three days out the week.” It involves integrating a plan of some sort to get to your Outcome.
Identity - This is the deepest and most ingrained layer. This is concerned with who we believe to be as a person. “I’m someone who likes working out.” “I’m someone who’s healthy.” “I’m terrible with going to the gym.”
If our Identity is incongruent with our Outcomes and Processes, it’s like there’s an invisible anchor that’s pulling us down until we can no longer tread, and eventually sink.
Generally, people don’t think about their Identity. They likely think something along these lines: “I want to lose weight (Outcome) and if I keep eating healthy I’ll lose the weight (Process).”
Here’s an example Clear uses: Imagine there’s two people that are trying to quite smoking. Both are asked if they want a cigarette.
Person one says “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.”
Person two says “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.”
What’s the difference? Person One is approaching this from a Outcome-Based Approach, and Person Two is approaching this from an Identity-Based Approach. The former works their way inside the onion, the latter works their way from the inside out.
You have to take into account your Identity. If you keep telling yourself that you hate going to the gym or you’ll never lose the weight, that is who you are. Trying to do otherwise is like pushing that boulder up the hill.
Identity is everything. With going to the gym or changing your nutrition, the goal isn’t to do those specific things: The goal is to become someone who is healthy. If you become that person, you’ve changed your self-image.
Well that’s peaches and cream! But how do we change our Identity?
Here’s a great example Clear uses to explain this: Imagine we’re voting for the next President, and I vote for Candidate A. Even though I voted for them, that doesn’t mean they automatically beat Candidate B. What determines this is whichever side has more votes when they’re added up.
Your actions determine your Identity.
If you want to identify as someone who’s healthy, each action you do that a healthy person would is a vote in that direction. The more votes you have, the more evidence that you’re someone who’s healthy.
If you have 100 votes for healthy, but you have one incident where you have a little too much to eat, that one vote isn’t going to sway the whole decision.
Instead of Being Outcome-Based, be Identity-Based. If you want to have that beach body, ask yourself, “Who is the type of person who could have a beach body?” Once you ask yourself this, you then naturally begin to work on the Process.
Doing this is huge. Don’t focus on the Outcome, focus on the Identity. Then work your way from there.
How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps
Why do people build Habits anyways. It’s not accidental; we’re designed to have Habits in our lives - 40-50% of everything we do is Habits!
As you may have noticed the last time you ordered from GrubHub, we want things as quick as possible. More importantly, we want things that satisfy a Craving as quick as possible.
The four steps into what a Habit is is as follows: Cue, Craving, Response, Reward.
Whenever we get any sort of Cue that leads to a Craving, we want the Reward as soon as possible.
Let’s use an example of feeling like you can’t stop eating junk food. What causes you to do it could be a number of things, but let’s use a common cue of Stress.
There may have been one day you were feeling stressed. Is your Craving to eat junk food? No, your Craving is to relieve the stress. You’re feeling stressed, and you decide to eat junk food. The pleasure this brings you alleviates the stress; the alleviation of the stress is the Reward.
Summarized: The Cue is the stress, the Craving is to relieve the stress, the Response is to eat junk food, and the Reward is alleviating the stress.
Your brain loves when Cravings are cured, and now you’ve associated eating junk food with relieving stress. Your brain will remember this, and if this repeats, it will begin to become a Habit and will become second-hand nature.
If we take any of these steps of the Habit Cycle and modify them, we can learn how to build and break Habits. For example, if you’re trying to build a Habit, making the Cue as obvious as possible will do wonders. Let’s take the inverse of this: If you’re trying to break a Habit, making the Cue as invisible as possible will do wonders too. For someone who’s addicted to gambling, if you keep them from hearing the sounds of the slot machines, you’ve eliminate the Cue.
In Conclusion
Remember what the definition of Atomic Habits means: Taking very small increments, performing them regularly, and achieving great power.
Focus on making 1% changes each day.
Don’t focus on the Outcome; focus on the Identity. “Who is the type of person who’s healthy? What actions would someone perform who has a six-pack, and how can I emulate that?”
This may still seem like a lot. And that’s okay!
Over the next several blog posts, we’ll be delving into each of the steps - Cue, Craving, Response, Reward - and how we can tinker with these to build the life we want.
And working on our Habits is how we build the life we want, consider they make up as much as 50% of our daily actions. Therefore, if you’ve been frustrated in the past with not having the health, figure, or six-pack you want, understanding Habits will give you the edge to finally have the life you deserve.