Life Leveling

Today marks day 8 of reading Atomic Habits, in this chapter review, we will learn about the 2nd Law of Behavior Change, the dopamine-driven feedback loop, and temptation bundling.

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 7, where we learned about adapting our environment to make bad temptations invisible, so that we can save energy by not having to constantly use will-power.

Chapter Summary:

• “The 2nd Law of Behavior Change is make it attractive.” If something is attractive, then we are much more likely to do it. Society is filled with loads of examples of this, as many companies are fully aware of this fact and take advantage of it. Examples of this are: Store mannequins with exaggerated features to sell clothes, social media delivering more praise than we could ever receive through “likes”, online pornography puts together the most stimulating scenes at a rate that is impossible to replicate in real life. It’s important to be aware of this fact if you want to change your environment in a way that makes you successful.
• “The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming” I feel like this is why we so often develop bad habits, because they are made to be very attractive, whether it’s the design of the addictive apps icon on your phone that tempts you to click it, or the literal design of the app to constantly keep your attention.
• “Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act.” In the next paragraph we will dive into this concept in a bit more detail, but essentially, for something to become habitual, we need to have some sort of dopamine feedback loop to have motivation to do the task.
• “It is the anticipation of a reward-not the fulfillment of it-that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.” This completely shifted my perspective, as I and I assume many others, assumed that dopamine was when you did the action. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that dopamine is also given through anticipation. A good example of this would be if you were planning to go to a waterpark with friends, you will receive dopamine just at the thought of doing this, although the actual action of hanging out with your friends at the waterpark could either meet expectation, exceed expectation, or fail to meet expectation, which will affect the amount of dopamine you receive while doing the action. In my life I notice that my anticipation of going to the gym is usually negative, despite the actual action of going to the gym and working out is usually fairly positive, and I don’t just find myself trying to get through the workout as fast as possible.
• “Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.” The formula for this is: “After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].” The idea, of course, is that you will be able to get through the task you need to do, in anticipation of the task you want to do. Now, I personally, think this can be effective if you need an extra boost to get through a task, but I think it can also be a bit of a negative. I would argue that it’s better to try and make the task you need to do more attractive, hopefully getting to the point where you enjoy doing the task, and don’t only do it in anticipation of another task. For me, I sometimes struggle to edit my videos, as sometimes it can be tedious, but I also know I am capable of enjoying it as well, since I sometimes thoroughly enjoy doing it. I’d suggest instead, removing distractions, or activities that seem more appealing, from your environment, either partially or fully, depending on if it’s just a complete net negative. If you do so, you may find yourself becoming bored, because you removed distractions like video-games, tv, your phone, etc. Since you are bored and we hate being bored, you will eventually find yourself naturally navigating towards these “tedious, boring, hard” tasks, and begin to rediscover the fun you can have when it’s not constantly being compared to some other over-stimulating activity.

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