Atomic Habits: James Clear’s vision

woman turning around on green fields

Your life is a constant need to build habits or change some of the previous ones.

And you need to ask yourself do you need any change? In what position are you now? 

Do you want to be healthy or be like the way you are eating junk foods all the time as you cannot stop your habit of love for junk food? 

Are you pleased with your habits? Or is there any probability left to improve? 

Well, the truth is all these questions come when you start to talk about habits.

What you frequently do, and what you look up at, 

Is there any change you want to make? And most greatly, how are you going to achieve that?

But first, we need to learn-

What are habits? 

Habits are context-behaviour alliances in recollection that evolve as people repeatedly experience rewards for action in a particular period.

And to understand it more deeply James Clear the author of ‘Atomic Habits’ has

created a well-nourished framework to understand the art of developing habits, to make your life more impactful, easier and healthful to proceed even more.

Process of building new habits: 

The process of building new habits can be divided into four parts- cues and the longing, reaction, and outcome.

And to proceed thoroughly we need to look inside it to understand the framework deeply- 

1. Cues- first there is a hint that triggers your brain to commence a behaviour. A cue is all-around your surroundings to give you a hint to follow a certain habit.

As the instinct follows your mind to accomplish is followed by a longing.

A cue is not just the stimuli to react, it’s a hint to follow what is constantly linking in your mind,

Suppose you are sleeping and suddenly it hits you, you get a cue in your sleep that to become hardworking again you need to become healthy, and not just healthy, you need to do some exercise or even yoga to control your body and mind, so yes, this is the first step towards building a new habit is to get a cue to work on.

2. Longing- Ask yourself why you want to build a new habit? Is there any change you need in your daily life? The longing provides you with the motivation to do it. It generates more factors in your brain to build that certain habit that you always wanted to make in your life.

People have different longings according to their factors of motivation to achieve their goals. 

For a fitness expert, a longing is not what the supplements he gets. Longing is what makes him feel when he follows the same routine of exercise and stays fit every day.

Longing can be the biggest energy booster of your life if you are ready to follow it with your impressions, sentiments and emotions.

3. Reaction- a reaction is the third step to building a new habit. It is an action to your longing. It shows the action which makes you realise what your powers are. What’s inside your head, are you the motivated one to fill those gaps in your behaviour to proceed with an action or are you still somewhere stuck in those past habits where you were less compatible to stay fit.

Well, truth to be told, the reaction is your ability to mould yourself in the change which you are looking at and if you accomplished your reaction to your longing then bravo! You are one step ahead to break the loop.

Reward- Reward is the ultimate step in building your new habit. 

The reward is the result you get after acting the action which will make you look at the outcomes with more instincts and thoughts. 

As rewards are not only those that make you settle in, rewards are those to critically analyse your outcomes to make yourself more consistent with your habits.

And we chase rewards because they serve us two important purposes-

(1) they relieve us- 

A reward relieves your craving of becoming what you need, what change you have always wanted to achieve. When you get yearned for a process to accomplish you get satisfied by your rewards. 

A fitness expert gets satisfied by the result he gets from following the regular pattern of the exercise in his body.

An artist gets satisfied by the outcome of the painting he was working on for many days, A writer gets satisfied by the final publishing work he ever wanted to do in his life to achieve the next level

So you see? To get satisfied we chase rewards.

(2) they teach us- 

Sometimes you get what you were expecting, and sometimes you feel a little failure in wanting your cue but that’s not the point here! The point is the process of what you learned from it. What you will remember in the future, if the reward you get is worth remembering in future then you will always get instinct in your mind, and if it’s not then it’s not a worry too as you at least now know what reward is a disappointment for you.

Both negative and positive feedback is important to work a mechanism, that’s why it is the only thing to learn from your reward.

As rewards are those which don’t let you fall into the constant loop of the habit. Once the reward is accomplished you will break the loop and establish a new habit in your life.

Now, you need to understand that as this process includes four fragments, our behaviour must work accordingly to every fragment. A cue is needed to be well followed if you don’t trust your instinct truly well then it will be hard to crack the constant loop of developing a new habit.

Then there comes the next process of longing. A  real longing will not let you sleep until it is achieved, so you need to pour your heart out to develop your longing.

After that, the action comes. If you are not motivated enough then you will never be able to break the constant loop, so it’s better to be motivated and put in some effort in the order to claim your reward.

Now, after building good habits you need to break some bad ones too by going understanding these points- 

Excellence is over quantity-  yes, that’s a well-proven fact that excellence is more important than quality. And it doesn’t matter how many days you work if you are not able to bring the satisfying result you want. So instead of following the same routine, look at it carefully and ask yourself what change it’s needed, what you can do more, make it more cultivated, and give less focus to the quantity as the quantity will fade away easily but quality? It is worth doing all the hard work for! 

Your health is more important- to achieve the planned goal you need to understand your health is the biggest asset you have in your life. As smoking is injurious to health it affects your body system likewise to pursue your goal while neglecting your health is dangerous enough to let you fall again into the neverending loop.

Individuality over goals- you need to understand that creating your individuality in the world is more important than the simple act of creating goals for your life. Do you only want to fulfil a goal or do you want to create your identity as writers do by nourishing their skills every day, as singers do by humming the constant rhythm of beats of their heart, as an athlete does by practising daily for the rest of their life!  You see, building your identity is more important than just accomplishing your goals.

Goals are overestimated – you need to understand those goals of your life are sometimes underestimated, suppose you are a teenager with a young mind who made a goal that by the age of thirty-five, you will achieve everything, and that is going to be the biggest blunder of your life, it will make you feel more devastated than less satisfied by your life.

Beware of sudden satisfaction – you need to understand that all famous personalities didn’t achieve the worth they hold now in a night, they did hard work throughout their life, worked day and night to follow the passion they have always been holding on to, so the thing is- people only look at the result,  they hardly care about the process, so the next to break a bad habit is to understand the process even more.

Opinion to seek

In my opinion, the secret to living happily and reducing your bad habits is not inputting the pressure and constant change into moulding yourself to your surroundings, always getting ready for new outcomes, trusting your process and your ability, and doing hard work every day to get a blissful mind throughout your life.

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