In 2021, I interviewed James Clear on The Drive to talk about his book “Atomic Habits.” The podcast was so popular that we have re-released it around New Year’s Day every year since. This year, we’ve also decided to do a special end-of-year newsletter in which we use specific examples from the past year’s worth of podcast episodes to illustrate how to apply James’s insights across a variety of health and wellness areas.

The four steps to developing a habit

Your health goals are probably easy to articulate, but your “system” – the collection of habits that you regularly follow — is what will ultimately determine whether you reach them. As James explained on the podcast, a large amount of our behavior (40-50%) is automatic and habitual, and we are building habits all the time whether we are consciously aware of it or not. Forming good habits is an essential part of both my clinical practice and my approach to my own health and life. While our ultimate goal is to change behaviors, we have to start with forming habits. A series of small and easy changes can collectively make a very big difference.

The key to James’s advice is to follow four “laws” to incorporate an action into your routine so that it becomes a habit: 1) Make it obvious; 2) Make it attractive; 3) Make it easy; and 4) Make it satisfying.

In this newsletter, we’re going to go through each of these elements and apply them to some of the actionable health advice we received from guests on The Drive over the past year.

1. Make it obvious

Cues promoting a good habit should be easy to spot and grab one’s attention. For example, if you want to run each morning, put your running shoes by the door as a visual reminder. Of course, this step requires you to first identify such potential cues. Ask yourself what visual reminders would help you and where in your home, office, car, or anywhere else they should be.

As an example, consider our episode on foot health with Courtney Conley, who emphasized that we lose strength in our feet as we age, which can lead to instability and injury. As we discussed in that episode, toe spacers can help to enhance foot proprioception and toe strength, so for those who want to develop the habit of wearing toe spacers, a great first step would be to keep them in obvious places. Put a pair by your bed so that they are the first thing you see in the morning, have a pair right outside the bathroom so you’ll put them on after showering, and/or keep some upstairs and some downstairs.

Similarly, we can apply this “law” to weight training. Belinda Beck and I discussed how starting a weight training program can be highly beneficial for older women to stave off age-related bone loss, and for those who haven’t been in the habit of engaging in this type of exercise, an obvious cue would be very helpful in forming such a habit. Do you want to lift first thing in the morning? Put a small weight outside your bedroom door or near the coffee maker. If you prefer to do it in the evening, place a weight near where you keep your pajamas or next to the couch where you relax after work. Cues like this will help you begin to connect the habit with a specific time of day and allow you to incorporate it into your daily routine.

2. Make it attractive

We all intuitively know that making something appealing or exciting will increase our motivation to do it. Your social environment is very important in determining how attractive something is, especially in the long term. If your goal is to stop drinking, going to bars with your martini-loving friends is going to make you miserable and undermine your goal. Having an alcohol-free game night at your house, though, can help you to break the association between drinking and fun and offers the added bonus of the anticipation of having friends over. The physical environment is important in developing habits too. If your goal is to eat more vegetables, make sure your pantry isn’t full of tempting junk food and that your fridge is stocked with your favorite vegetable-based snacks.

One of the most effective ways of making a new habit attractive is to involve a friend. A woman trying to follow Belinda Beck’s suggestion to do resistance training might find it much more enjoyable to begin the program with a group of friends or by finding a weightlifting club for seniors. As another example, in my discussion with Eric Ravussin, we talked about the advantages of intermittent fasting. Breaking your fast with a friend who is also practicing IF, or texting each other in support as you adjust to fasting hours, can change the feeling of the experience from a limitation to a cooperative endeavor. This can also work with children and pets: a walk can be an opportunity to talk to your child away from screens, and going for a run might be a great time to enjoy the fresh air with your dog.

3. Make it easy

Convenience and simplicity make it more likely that you will perform a behavior regularly. James gave an example of a man who went to the gym for six weeks but only stayed for five minutes; he made going to the gym much easier by focusing first on the habit of getting there, without concerning himself with the more intimidating task of working out for an hour. The “two-minute rule” can also be useful when you are getting started: condense the habit you want to start into something that takes two minutes or fewer to do. This feels much more manageable and allows you to gradually build up as each step feels easier to do.

In my conversation with Luc van Loon, he stressed how multiple periods of inactivity can result in drops in muscle mass. Consistency of training is important, but it’s hard to keep up when your routine changes, such as when you’re on a business trip. These circumstances might necessitate finding a way to reintroduce convenience and simplicity. If your hotel doesn’t have a gym, bring travel weights you can fill with water so you have them available when you need them. Before you leave home, locate a park near your hotel where you could run or walk so you don’t have to make any effort to figure out where to go once you arrive. Making it as easy as possible to keep up your fitness routine increases the chances that you will avoid gaps in your exercise program.

4. Make it satisfying

Tracking your progress and seeing the improvements that come with your new habit will provide a strong motivation to keep progressing towards your goal. After my interview with Olav Bu about VO₂ max, I purchased a portable VO₂ device and had a lot of fun tracking this metric during various activities. While not everyone may want to shell out the high cost of these devices, it’s a great example of measurement being a good motivator – it interested me and had the added benefit of encouraging exercise so I could monitor my levels. This can be applied to a number of health habits: watching your weight decrease, your muscle mass go up, or your blood glucose levels stabilize is deeply satisfying.

Not all progress is easily measurable, though, so short-term rewards can also be an effective way of making change feel satisfying. Imagine buying yourself a new outfit after a month of successful weight training or splurging on a new sound system after redesigning your environment to support healthy eating and keeping it that way for six weeks. However, we must be careful to ensure the rewards are consistent with the overall goals: don’t buy yourself ice cream as a reward for losing weight or a more comfortable couch for becoming physically active.

Breaking bad habits

Just as it’s important to develop good habits, it’s often necessary to break bad ones. Unsurprisingly, the steps for breaking a bad habit are the reverse of the four laws for developing good ones.

On The Drive, Julia Wattacheril emphasized that maintaining liver health is a particularly high priority because we have no way of repairing the liver or replicating its function beyond a certain point. Reducing or quitting alcohol consumption is key to preventing liver damage, including alcoholic fatty liver disease (AFLD).

This is a perfect example of how to apply the anti-rules to break a bad habit. We can “make it invisible” by removing alcohol from anywhere that’s easy to see, such as by placing it in the rear of a cupboard rather than on a countertop. We can “make it unattractive” by avoiding bars and parties where everyone around will be drinking and engaging in more alcohol-free social time to sever the association between alcohol and fun in your mind. Perhaps you can even recall a time you got sick from overdrinking or carry a photo of a diseased liver in your wallet. To “make it difficult,” one might lock alcohol in a difficult-to-reach place, or better yet, avoid keeping alcohol in the house at all. It takes much more effort to run to the store than to walk to the next room. And finally, we can “make it unsatisfying” by imposing small punishments for exceeding your desired drinking amount. Perhaps for each drink you have, you have to pay an accountability partner or forgo watching your favorite show. If there is a food that upsets your digestive system, try pairing it with drinking until you associate the bad feeling with the taste of alcohol.

Bottom line

Setting up good health habits now can enhance your healthspan and likely your lifespan, too. The “laws” we learned from James Clear can help us apply the lessons we learned from the other podcast guests. In our podcasts, we aim to provide you with actionable steps to put the science of longevity into practice. As we enter a new year, think about the health goals you’d like to reach and the “atomic habits” that will help you get there. Happy New Year!

Podcasts cited in this newsletter

#183 – James Clear: Building & Changing Habits – Peter Attia (November 8, 2021)

For a list of all previous weekly emails, click here.