I Read Atomic Habits and It Has Changed Me
Is this the start of a beautiful new path where I consistently practice habits to achieve my best self?! Here are my top 3 reflections from the James Clear novel that make me think so.
Salutations, lovely blog readers! I finally made it to my hometown of San Diego after a dense marine layer here shut down the airport until the following morning. What’s funny is that it took me a mile of walking to my gate at SeaTac only to be turned away and politely told to, “Try again tomorrow.” But… I guess walking is my thing, so I’m not complaining. Thankfully, we had a nice flight this morning and for once, I didn’t purchase the $8.00 internet package and I instead allowed myself intentional time to knit, read, and answer my direct messages on Instagram.
BEFORE I GET TOO FAR — Our first Seattle community walk of 2025 is on 1/4 at 9:30am in collab with The Farmer’s Dog, so yes! Please bring your cute pups! I believe they’re sending treats and bandanas, so it’s going to be a fun time. Whether you have a dog or not, you’re invited to join :) You can sign up here, on our club’s Strava page.
I’m also thinking of hosting a monthly knitting/crochet night in Seattle, so let me know if you’d be interested! I know a lot of you had reached out saying that you, too, wanted to be on your phone less in 2025, so let’s hold each other accountable while playing with yarn.
I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting recently about how I want my 2025 to kick off, and setting better technology boundaries is very high on my list. I find myself (as I’m sure many of us do) mindlessly scrolling without intention other than to pass time. I’m not even conscious that it’s happening — it’s just, whenever I have a spare moment, I find myself pulling open the Instagram app and just swiping, tapping and scrolling without a second thought. I wonder how much time I’d have back to myself if I cut this habit completely?
And… That perfectly segues me into today’s topic of habits! I feel like I’m constantly posting about new morning routines I’m trying to implement from waking up at 5:30am, meal tracking, doing yoga first thing when I wake up, walking 3 miles around Green Lake before 8am, practicing movement during lunchtime, etcetera etcetera. I’ve been all over the board this year, grasping for any habit as quickly as possible. To my dismay, none of these habits have really stuck and I feel beaten down each time — like I just don’t have the discipline to either create or stop habits.
That being said, the one habit that I have been able to consistently maintain on the daily has been reading one chapter of a non-fiction book each morning directly after my block walk — ah, the sweet smell of habit stacking! I became quite the bookworm in 2020 (where are my ACOTAR fans at) and while I’ve mainly stayed in the romance and fantasy lanes, I’ve always saved self-help/non-fiction to my “To Be Read” list in Goodreads, as an intention for my future self, who cares more about self improvement than current Sara, to see. Of course, I’ve picked up many a non-fiction book, but I’ve since concluded that listening to audiobooks of non-fictions doesn’t work for me; I need to be able to actively highlight the sentences on a page to comprehend and absorb them. What’s changed for me is that instead of reading non-fictions as a means of self improvement and betterment, I view them as learning material. Just as I was assigned chapters of textbooks to read in high school and college, I now assign myself daily reading as an adult — because let’s be real, how often are we learning brand new materials as adults outside of our jobs and day-to-day lives?
My most recent read has been Atomic Habits by James Clear. This is a title that has been begging me to open for years, so I’m really proud of myself for sticking this one through because I really took away a lot from it and I want to share some of my favorite (paraphrased) takeaways and reflections of it here for you!
1. Check your environment and systems.
In Atomic Habits, Clear outlines the 4 steps to create a habit and the 4 steps to curb a habit, and a major theme around both is the environment in which they exist and less about your willpower and determination. If you’re creating an environment to set yourself up for success, then you’ll have much greater odds in succeeding. Let’s go with an example here:
You want to break your habit of doom scrolling every night before bed, but you can’t seem to pry yourself away from your screen. Instead of blaming yourself for not having control, take the steps needed to set yourself up for success, and in this case, it might look like moving your phone charger to another room (make it invisible) — in other words, your phone’s “docking station” is nowhere near your bed. Case #2, you want to go for a morning yoga class right when you wake up but you’re not a morning person, so set out your outfit, fill your water bottle, and prepare your breakfast the night before so you don’t have to think about it in the morning. As Clear suggests throughout the book — make it easy.
2. Saying, “I won’t do __,” isn’t good enough. Create a self-loyalty program to improve chances of success.
This one has been a game changer for me, as someone who has deeply struggled with dermotillomania for over 12 years. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I’ll save you the Google search. It’s essentially manic skin picking that can be triggered by seeing anything resembling an “imperfection,” anywhere on the body. I’ve dealt with this for the majority of my teen/adult life and I’ve been unable to stop myself after trying meditation, covering our bathroom mirror with sheets and encouraging sticky notes, avoiding using any lights in the bathroom, and yes, even therapy for it. What has helped me to curb this compulsive habit can be found in chapter 15, The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change.
This chapter is about creating a positive, reinforcing behavior to reward you for an action — because saying, “I’m not going to pick my face anymore,” isn’t holding me, you, or anyone accountable. The human brain works by repeating actions that have favorable outcomes, so if you say you want to stop picking your skin, but no favorable outcome occurs, then it’s going to be harder to adopt that action. So now, as recommended in the book, I transfer $1 from my checking to savings each day I go without picking my skin and this money is for me to use on whatever I want… Which is usually spent at Lush buying fun skincare or bath bombs. As silly as it might sound, creating a self-loyalty program has been the instant gratification step needed for me to want to stop picking my skin. Of course, I would be lying if I said I haven’t picked my face since I started this loyalty program, but what’s important here is consistency and winning a majority of the battles. Remember that progress isn’t always linear.
3. “Go big or go home” doesn’t work for forming habits.
I really love this message from the book and find it incredibly relatable as someone who approaches life with a “trial by fire” mentality — starting gymnastics at age 14 and training with 5 year olds, joining my high school’s jazz band on tenor saxophone (an instrument I took up two weeks prior), competing with a sub-par butterfly stroke on swim team during month 1 with no prior ability to butterfly. It’s a common theme in my life, to say the least.
This book made me realize that one of the reasons I have such a hard time establishing habits is that I’m setting goals that are far too lofty and when they fizzle, I think I failed my future self in someway and I hopelessly give up.
There’s a reason why my 30-minute meditations didn’t stick, and it’s the same reason why my goal to read 50 books in a year failed — after previously not even reading 10 in a year. I focus too much on the person I want to become/the person who successfully performs __ habit is, and I’m losing sight of what it takes to get there. In other words, I’m expecting instant results with unachievable goals. Taking a step back and reanalyzing, in order to be successful, I should start off by meditating for 5 minutes and increase my time from there, because what truly matters at the beginning of a habit is that you show up, rather than the elapsed time of the action. Next, I should’ve set my goal to 10 or 15 books, rather than 50. It would have been a reasonable number to achieve had I read at least 40 books in a previous year, but I let my self-consciousness get the best of me after seeing how many books my friends read in a year from their annual Goodreads summaries. I’m going to close this reflection here reiterating the point: practice showing up more than the goal itself; consistency is KEY.
I felt called to post about my reading of Atomic Habits here because we’re quickly approaching 2025 and this is a time when big goals are set and without proper nurturing, these goals will be left to wither away come spring and we don’t want that! We want to see each other thrive and become the best versions of who we dream to be! I know starting with baby steps can be difficult, but this book has taught me how essential these baby steps can be if we want to be consistent in building lasting habits or dismantling unfavorable ones.
If Atomic Habits has, like me, been in your TBR forever, this is your sign coming from the universe in the form of a Substack post, encouraging you to take it off your shelf (digital or physical) and give it a read. Even if it’s just one chapter per day — compounded actions are what creates lasting habits! If you’ve already read it, I’d love to know what stuck out for you, too. There are so many golden nuggets in this book (I think I had 173 highlights according to my Goodreads summary) and I truly find myself better equipped to recognize the foundations of strong habits in my own life.
Sending you all lots of love as we enter into the holiday season <3 Most important, give yourself some grace this time of year. Humans aren’t meant to perform at maximum capacity 100% of the time, and this is especially applicable to the winter months and the time around the Winter Solstice. I’m looking forward to seeing you all for next week’s last post of the year and I’m excited for all that’s to come in the new one!
From my soles to yours,
Sara xx