Atomic Habits, by James Clear

Humans are creatures of habit. Building on the work of Charles Duhigg, James Clear further advances our understanding of habit formation and maintenance. The subtitle says it all. Tiny changes can lead to remarkable results. Techniques like habit stacking can be life-altering.

A revolution in how you spend your time and what you achieve as a result begins with awareness, and James Clear maintains a website with free downloads of worksheets designed to help you expose your current habits to view and create a foundation for change.

It's the season for New Year's Resolutions, so this is a good time to check out his podcast.  A summary of the book's contents can be found here. Notable quote: "You get what you repeat."

A lot of what Clear says is surprising. For instance, he warns that "Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to override your desires every time." The secret of self-control, he believes, is in the environment and cues. "Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues to your bad ones invisible."

Some astonishing research demonstrates this point. Although of the heroin users who go into rehab, about 90 percent relapse when they return to their old haunts, the case of the returning veterans proved opposite. Work done by Lee Robins, a psychiatric epidemiology researcher, demonstrated that about 90 percent of heroin-addicted soldiers who served in Vietnam got clean when they left the place and conditions where they had become addicted. This stood in stark contrast to the belief of the time (still prevalent) that drug addiction is an irreversible condition, caused by moral failing and lack of willpower. The research presented by Clear suggests that nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, when all the cues are removed, old habits can simply "fall away."

Another amazing passage discusses supernormal stimuli. The research into this began in the 1940s with Tinbergen, who studied geese and gulls. Advertisers quickly cottoned on to the fact that  "Humans are also prone to fall for exaggerated version of reality." Junk food is constantly being engineered for taste and texture so that it "drives our reward systems into a frenzy." The fact that too many chips make your mouth feel like sandpaper isn't a problem either, since "your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them."

Overall, this book inspired me to remember a great truth. It's the things we're absolutely sure of that put our thinking on the wrong track. To escape some of the manipulation we are subjected to daily, we need always to be open to questioning the embedded "truths" that our societies impose on us.