Today marks day 4 of reading Atomic Habits, and today was yet another great chapter!
The book itself is very highly rated on amazon https://amzn.to/3x4K7Sa (affiliate link to book), boasting a 4.7 star rating over 157,532 reviews. The book also claims to have sold over 15 million copies as of Oct. 16, 2018 and has sold over 20 million copies as of Mar. 4, 2024.
This chapter follows up Chapter 3, where we learned about Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward. Without further ado, let’s get into the chapter review!
Chapter Summary:
- “With enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it.” This is referring to a story told in the chapter about a man who’s daughter-in-law, noticed he was possibly having a heart attack by the way his skin colour looked on his face. With repetition of tasks, we sometimes develop these almost “super-human” abilities to do things.
- “Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing” A simple yet important thing to be aware of. I myself, actually noticed I was biting my nails while playing a video-game the other day, which really confused me, because I don’t bite my nails. I think it may have been caused by reading about people sub-consciously biting their nails, but I’m honestly not sure. I am glad though, that I became aware of it and stopped.
- “The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.” Like I said in the last paragraph, I became aware of my unconscious nail biting and therefore was able to put a stop to it, but had I never became aware of it, I would have never been able to put a stop to it.
- “Pointing-and-Calling raises your level of awareness from a non-conscious habit to a more conscious level by verbalizing your actions.” Pointing-and-Calling is a term we learned in this chapter. It means to point out something you are doing and verbally acknowledge what you are about to do and the consequences of doing it. For example, I can point at a slice a pizza, say I am going to eat the pizza, and verbally acknowledge that eating this pizza will be unhealthy for me. Doing this significantly lowers the chance of you doing a task you don’t want to be doing, as saying it out-loud makes it a lot more real to us.
- “The Habits Scorecard is a simple exercise you can use to become more aware of your behavior.” A “Habits Scorecard” is essentially writing on a piece of paper every task you do from waking up onward to become aware of what you may be unconsciously doing. After you have done this, you want to go through each thing you did and either place a (+),(-), or (=) sign next to it, a (+) is a “good habit” (we also learned good habit is technically a correct term, as there really is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” habit, just a habit that either gets you closer to who you want to be or pushes you farther from who you want to be) the (-) would be a “bad” habit and (=) is a “neutral” habit.
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