The Healthiest Habit-Building

Why was that book “Atomic Habits” called that? It wasn’t just because it’s a catchy title…

Habits are—much like atoms—things that are almost imperceptibly small, yet when stacked, they make up the substance of many much larger and more obvious things, and also contain an immense amount of potential power.

About that power…

Habits are the “compound interest” of natural human life. Every action we take, every decision we make, makes our life (often imperceptibly) better or worse. But getting even just 1% better or 1% worse at something every day? That’s going to not just add up over time… It’ll actively compound over time.

Habits will snowball one way or the other, good or bad. So, we want to control that snowball so that it works for us rather than against us.

Thus, we need to choose habits that are helpful to us, rather than those that are harmful to us. Top examples include:

• Making healthy food choices rather than unhealthy ones
• Moving our body regularly rather than being sedentary
• Having a good bedtime/morning routine rather than a daily chaotic blur
• Learning constantly rather than digging into old beliefs out of habit
• Forging healthy relationships rather than isolating ourselves

We all know that to make a habit stick, we need to practice it regularly, with opinions varying on how long it takes for something to become habit. Some say 21 days; some say 66. The number isn’t the important part!

What is important

You will never get to day 66, much less will you get to day 366, if you don’t first get to day 6 (New Year’s Resolutions, anyone?).

So in the early days especially, when the habit is most likely to get dropped, it’s critical to make the habit as easy as possible to form.

That means:

• The habit should be made as pleasant as possible
  • (e.g. by making modifications to it if it’s not already intrinsically pleasant)
• The habit should take under 2 minutes to do at first
  • (no matter if it takes longer than 2 minutes to be useful; it’ll never be useful if you don’t first get it to stick, so make your initial commitment only 2 minutes, just to get in the habit)
• The habit should have cues to remind you
  • (as it’s not habit yet, you will need to either set a reminder on your phone, or leave a visual reminder, such as your workout clothes laid out ready for you in the morning, or a bowl of fruit in plain view where you spend a lot of time)

What gets measured, gets done

Streaks are a great way to do this. Habit-tracking apps help. Marks on a calendar or in a journal are also totally fine.

What can help especially, and that a lot of people don’t do, is to have a system of regular personal reviews—like a work “performance review”, but for oneself and one’s own life.

Set a reminder or write on the calendar / in your diary, to review monthly, or weekly if you prefer, such things as:

• How am I doing in the areas of life that are important to me?
  • Have a list of the areas of life that are important to you, by the way, and genuinely reflect on each of them, e.g:
    • Health
    • Finances
    • Relationships
    • Learning
    • Sleep
    • Etc
• What is working for me, and what isn’t working for me?
• What will I do better in this next month/week?

…and then do it!

Good luck, and may it all stack up in your favor!

The Science Of Motivation (And How To Use It To Your Advantage)

When we do something rewarding, our brain gets a little (or big!) spike of dopamine. Dopamine is popularly associated with pleasure—which is fair— but there’s more to it than this.

Dopamine is also responsible for motivation itself, as a prime mover before we do the thing that we find rewarding. If we eat a banana, and enjoy it, perhaps because our body needed the nutrients from it, our brain gets a hit of dopamine.

(and not because bananas contain dopamine; that dopamine is useful for the body, but can’t pass the blood-brain barrier to have an effect on the brain)

So where does the dopamine in our brain come from? That dopamine is made in the brain itself.

Key Important Fact: the brain produces dopamine when it expects an activity to be rewarding.

If you take nothing else away from today’s newsletter, let it be this!

It makes no difference if the activity is then not rewarding. And, it will keep on motivating you to do something it anticipated being rewarding, no matter how many times the activity disappoints, because it’ll remember the very dopamine that it created, as having been the reward.

To put this into an example:

• How often have you spent time aimlessly scrolling social media, flitting between the same three apps, or sifting through TV channels when “there’s nothing good on to watch”?
• And how often did you think afterwards “that was a good and rewarding use of my time; I’m glad I did that”?

In reality, whatever you felt like you were in search of, you were really in search of dopamine. And you didn’t find it, but your brain did make some, just enough to keep you going.

Don’t try to “dopamine detox”, though.

While taking a break from social media / doomscrolling the news / mindless TV-watching can be a great and healthful idea, you can’t actually “detox” from a substance your body makes inside itself.

Which is fortunate, because if you could, you’d die, horribly and miserably.

If you could “detox” completely from dopamine, you’d lose all motivation, and also other things that dopamine is responsible for, including motor control, language faculties, and critical task analysis (i.e. planning).

This doesn’t just mean that you’d not be able to plan a wedding; it also means:

• you wouldn’t be able to plan how to get a drink of water
• you wouldn’t have any motivation to get water even if you were literally dying of thirst
• you wouldn’t have the motor control to be able to physically drink it anyway

Read: Dopamine and Reward: The Anhedonia Hypothesis 30 years on

(this article is deep and covers a lot of ground, but is a fascinating read if you have time)

Note: if you’re wondering why that article mentions schizophrenia so much, it’s because schizophrenia is in large part a disease of having too much dopamine.

Consequently, antipsychotic drugs (and similar) used in the treatment of schizophrenia are generally dopamine antagonists, and scientists have been working on how to treat schizophrenia without also crippling the patient’s ability to function.

Do be clever about how you get your dopamine fix

Since we are hardwired to crave dopamine, and the only way to outright quash that craving is by inducing anhedonic depression, we have to leverage what we can’t change.

The trick is: question how much your motivation aligns with your goals (or doesn’t).

So if you feel like checking Facebook for the eleventieth time today, ask yourself: “am I really looking for new exciting events that surely happened in the past 60 seconds since I last checked, or am I just looking for dopamine?”

You might then realize: “Hmm, I’m actually just looking for dopamine, and I’m not going to find it there”

Then, pick something else to do that will actually be more rewarding. It helps if you make a sort of dopa-menu in advance, of things to pick from. You can keep this as a list on your phone, or printed and pinned up near your computer.

Examples might be: Working on that passion project of yours, or engaging in your preferred hobby. Or spending quality time with a loved one. Or doing housework (surprisingly not something we’re commonly motivated-by-default to do, but actually is rewarding when done). Or exercising (same deal). Or learning that language on Duolingo (all those bells and whistles the app has are very much intentional dopamine-triggers to make it addictive, but it’s not a terrible outcome to be addicted to learning!).

Basically… Let your brain’s tendency to get led astray work in your favor, by putting things in front of it that will lead you in good directions.

Things for your health and/or education are almost always great things to allow yourself the “ooh, shiny” reaction and pick them up, try something new, etc.