Is Atomic Habits a good book?

[Husseinisdoingfine]

I picked up Atomic Habits by James Clear just yesterday because I'm concerned about my bad habits which are ruining my ability to be effective in the world.

Has anyone else read this book as has it worked for you?

 

Edited Thursday at 07:39 PM by Husseinisdoingfine

[Human Mint]

Didn't like it. I prefer something like Mastery by Greene. It's better to understand what field you will be working on and the habits needed follow. So that's a priority for me.

[Ramanujan]

its a nice book. but tiny habit by bj fogg is the superiour book. tiny habit is the greatest book on habit right now. bj fogg is a scientist and he studied habits for a long time. 

tiny habit is scientific and very amazing. far better than atomic habit

[Vynce]

absolute waste of time. have not kept one word of what was written in it. skip.

[iamlite]

@Ramanujan Thanks a lot for the recommendation I will read the book. 

[InfinitePotential]

Addressing bad habits, especially addictive or compulsive ones, is in my estimation one of the most important and relevant subjects we could be exploring today. And I think that's only going to become more true.

Atomic Habits is worth a read, but the whole “just floss one tooth” or “just do one push-up” thing doesn’t particularly resonate with me.

Granted, if you genuinely committed to flossing just one tooth every day, you’d probably eventually become a person who flosses their teeth. Which is one of the main points of the book: make the behavior so easy that there’s virtually no resistance, and gradually it becomes part of your identity.

I think it’s pretty valuable for building new habits.

But for breaking deeply ingrained bad habits, especially addictive or compulsive behaviors, I’ve found other approaches more useful.

Some of the best resources I’ve come across:

 

Addictive Voice Recognition Technique (AVRT) — Taught in Jack Trimpey’s Rational Recovery. The book focuses primarily on alcohol addiction (with all my problems, thank God that’s not one of them 😅), but the principle can be applied more broadly.

The basic idea is to make a “Big Plan” to never do X again. Then, whenever a thought or feeling arises in support of doing X, recognize it as the “Addictive Voice,” or “the Beast.” It’s the part of you that only cares about getting X, regardless of the consequences for the rest of your life. And it’s very good at pretending to be you.

I take some issue with the “never do X again” commitment (or maybe that’s just my Beast talking 😂). It doesn’t always seem realistic or even appealing.

But the relentless recognition of anything and everything arguing for X is incredibly powerful. This has perhaps been the most powerful idea for me. But you gotta practice it.

Instead of feeling like you need to dig endlessly into your psyche, do shadow work, heal your inner child, revisit past traumas, etc., it’s wonderfully straightforward to just ask: “Is this thought or feeling arguing for X?” If so, recognize it for what it is. You don’t need to entertain the argument.

Not that deeper psychological work can’t be valuable. But you don’t need to resolve your entire psychological history to make a different decision right now. And indeed — all that stuff can be a way to perpetuate the addiction. “I still haven’t resolved Y, that’s why I still do X”.

 

Allen Carr’s Easyway — E.g., The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. These books are great at challenging the assumption that doing X is even what you really want.

Because look: if doing X were genuinely a net positive in your life, what would be the problem?

Easyway has you reconsider the supposed benefits. Smoking, for instance, is expensive, unpleasant in many respects, and much of the relief it provides comes from alleviating the withdrawal that smoking itself created.

My main criticism is that X often IS genuinely pleasurable. Otherwise, why would we keep doing it? I don’t think we need to pretend otherwise.

But there’s a huge difference between acknowledging that something provides pleasure and concluding that it’s actually improving your life. Easyway is excellent at challenging the latter.

 

The Freedom Model for Addictions — Another fascinating perspective. Its central argument is that we’re not powerless over an addiction. It actually challenges the notion of “addiction” outright. We continue doing X because, at some level, we believe doing X will make us happier than the alternatives.

So reconsider those beliefs. Really investigate what you’re getting out of the behavior, what it’s costing you, and what kind of relationship you actually want with it.

Maybe abstinence. Maybe moderation. Maybe something else.

I don’t necessarily agree with all its claims about the nature of addiction — it seems to brush aside some very real biological aspects of addiction as hogwash — but I find the emphasis on personal agency and reevaluating our preferences very valuable.

 

Urge surfing — A single practice more than a book / resource. But, kind of unavoidable when working through an addiction.

When an urge arises, simply observe it. Feel it in your body. Notice the sensations, the thoughts, the restlessness, the anticipation. Watch how it changes without immediately acting on it.

That’s it.

Don’t distract yourself. Don’t replace the addiction with something else more positive (though — you’ll do that naturally with more time!)

Just observe the urge and don’t act on it. Simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple.

If you actually commit to practicing urge surfing — this can work wonders.

Over time, you appreciate more and more that an urge can be present without needing to be obeyed.

And urges often become less frequent and less intense with time. Though particularly strong urges can absolutely arise long after the behavior has ceased.

The bottom line is that an urge isn’t a command that needs to be obeyed.

 

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — Closely related to urge surfing, but a broader framework.

One of its central ideas is “cognitive defusion”: learning to see thoughts as thoughts rather than instructions or truths that automatically require action.

The thought “I need X” comes up. Recognize it as a thought, not an instruction.

“I’m having the thought that I need X” is VERY different from “I need X.”

And rather than constantly fighting unwanted thoughts and feelings, ACT teaches allowing them to be present while choosing actions aligned with your deeper values.

You can experience craving, discomfort, anxiety, whatever — and still do what matters to you.

The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris is an excellent introduction.

 

Dopamine Nation, by Anna Lembke — Maybe one of the best books to read for The Science™ of addiction.

It explores how our brains regulate pleasure and pain, how repeated exposure to highly rewarding stimuli can reinforce compulsive behavior, and how our modern environment makes the whole situation extraordinarily difficult.

We’re surrounded by opportunities for immediate gratification that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.

Food, pornography, gambling, drugs, social media, video games, shopping, endless entertainment. Whatever your particular vulnerability, there’s probably an entire industry ready to cater to it.

One of the book’s central ideas is the pleasure-pain balance. Imagine a seesaw in your brain. When you experience something pleasurable, the balance tips toward pleasure. But the brain wants to restore equilibrium — homeostasis — so it compensates by tipping the balance back toward pain.

Lembke illustrates this with little imaginary gremlins jumping onto the pain side of the seesaw.

The problem is that the gremlins can overcorrect. And with repeated excessive stimulation, they become increasingly effective at tipping the balance toward pain. Eventually, you’re not even pursuing X so much for pleasure anymore. You’re pursuing it to relieve the discomfort of not doing X.

This rings as extremely true to me.

The book advocates a period of abstinence, often around 30 days, to give the brain’s reward system an opportunity to recover, followed by a reconsideration of what relationship you want with the behavior.

Obviously, the seesaw is a simplified analogy, and recovery isn’t governed by an exact 30-day clock. Also — quitting for 30 days is easier said than done! Duh, quit for 30 days. But how?

But it’s an incredibly useful framework for understanding why compulsive pleasure-seeking is so self-defeating and painful.

 

⸻

 

I would absolutely love to see more Actualized content devoted to breaking bad habits and addictions.

“Awareness Alone Is Curative” is a seriously powerful episode, but I think this subject is worth tackling from lots of different angles.

Because sure — if we could just turn up the dial on our awareness, that would help with a lot of things!

Like my point about Easyway: if you were fully aware of the entirety of the consequences of doing X, including all its immediate and far-reaching effects, choosing not to do X might become trivial.

But addiction has a way of obfuscating that awareness. When the craving comes, suddenly all the reasons not to do X become less compelling, and the immediate promise of pleasure becomes overwhelmingly important.

Sometimes “be more mindful” just ain’t gonna cut it. We need ways of actually bringing that awareness into the moments when we’re most inclined to lose it.

And frankly, I think this is one of the biggest things holding humanity back.

We’re up against some pretty powerful forces here. Our biology evolved to pursue rewarding experiences, and now we live in an environment where incredibly sophisticated technologies and businesses are competing to exploit those tendencies.

There’s a website, an app, a product, a substance, or an experience waiting to satisfy practically any craving you might have, often at the expense of your long-term well-being.

And this is only going to get more severe.

Learning how to relate to our own desires more consciously strikes me as one of the most valuable skills a human being can develop. I’d love to see more of that here.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t add one more tool against addiction: psychedelics.

Obviously, these need to be approached responsibly and with considerable care.

But man — the stories, The Science™… there’s some extraordinarily promising research on psychedelics for addiction.

In my estimate, psychedelics are perhaps the most powerful tools we have for addressing addiction.

That doesn’t mean you need psychedelics to overcome addictive behavior. Plenty of people do so without them. And psychedelics certainly aren’t a magic bullet.

But the possibility that a profound experience could help someone radically reconsider their relationship with a substance or behavior — and actually follow through on that realization — is fascinating to me.

More content on all of this, please!

[LordFall]

I read most of it for the book club I used to run, quite enjoyed it!

It takes some seemingly simple common knowledge about habits and fleshes them out as well as making them much more concrete. 

[Ulax]

I found it very helpful. Now I focus more on the advice in this video: