Review: Atomic Habits. An Easy & Proven way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad ones by James Clear
Quantum compulsion. That would be my title. I’m using a play on words here. I know this. Because I have a thesaurus. And it’s a very small one.
In this fascinating book, Clear breaks down the formation of habits into four stages: cue, craving, response and reward. In his work, he explores the mechanisms of the human brain, and how, using these stages, we build habits, whether we want to or not. However, he does give us a ray of hope, as he states in the title, he goes on to write about how to break bad habits and form good ones.
He describes an experiment where rats where given shots of dopamine every time they performed a specific action. This increased the level of activity of this action for all the rats involved in the study. However, when the study removed or blocked the dopamine receptors in the rat’s neurochemical make up, all the rodents died due to absolute lack of motivation to carry out even basic life sustaining movements.
Now, I wouldn’t suggest re producing this particular exercise and Clear advocates a number of other more practical and life sustaining ways that we can use with the help of neuroscience, to trick our brains into either reinforcing a healthy habit or ridding ourselves of an unhealthy one.
Take the cigarette smoker, if we apply the four stages we would have the cue, which is the experience of stress, stimulates the craving for the cigarette. The response is smoking of the cigarette and the reward is relief of the stress. The paradox here is that nicotine is a stimulant. But who said habits were logical.
Now, it’s so easy to knock over and break your antique vase, or stand on your new Smartphone and smash the screen. If you’re like me, you could break a glass pane from 3 metres if you sang to it. However, It’s a different ball game with habits. The book goes on to explore the ways we can cut the habits we no longer want, and to engage in new ones that will enhance our lives.
I won’t give the game away on this though, it would be a spoiler! I hope you will seek out and read the book! Perhaps by using one of your habits (retail therapy) you will experience the dopamine rush when you select Atomic Habits, swipe your card and feel the reward!
