In episode 107, “How to Love Good Habits”, we discuss Clear’s fourth law: Make it Satisfying. We give you tips on how to create great, healthy habits that you will actually enjoy doing. We continue our book study mini series over James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Learn how to start good habits and get rid of bad ones in these episodes. We discuss how small changes will make big impacts on how we live our lives.
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Make It Satisfying
Have you heard people say that “We’re living in a microwave generation.”? Turns out, we’ve always been living in a world where we want quick responses. Our brains are wired for immediate response, and we like it when that happens. Once our brain is rewarded, we want to repeat whatever action we did. Here’s the twist: many goals, dreams, and habits aren’t quick to happen. What’s the solution? Make the baby steps toward your good habits satisfying with a reward.
What is rewarded is repeated, what is punished is avoided. And no, we don’t mean reward yourself with a cake after you’ve competed a workout. Those two actions contradict each other and will not help you get 1% better every day. It can be this simple. Let’s say you’re trying to work on your anger boiling over. Anytime you feel anger coming on take three deep breaths and smile. The deep breathing will relax you and the smile will release serotonin & endorphins. Your brain will not know the difference, how cool is that? Here are some other rewards we discussed in episode 107, so be sure to tune in so you can hear how to apply these and more:
- Sticker charts
- Marble jar
- Paperclip method
- Habit tracker journal
- Vision board
- Screensaver
- Calendar reminders
- To do lists
Alignment & Accountability are Key
Always check to make sure that your rewards are aligning directly with your goals. If you’re working on becoming a more patient with your children, when you feel impatience coming on, stop, take three deep breaths, and hug your child. This one simple act will help and reward not only you, but the child you’re hugging as well.
Once you know that your rewards are aligned, get someone on board who can support you and ask the tough questions. This can be a mentor, friend, someone in your church home group, etc… Make sure that it’s appropriate to the situation, and give them permission to speak life into you (encouragement and constructive support). Implement healthy boundaries so that your habit building is productive and fruitful. For more information on how to set healthy boundaries, check out our Daring Greatly Mini Series (episodes 28-38).
Make it Unsatisfying
After we discuss how to create a new good habit using the step “make it satisfying”, we tell you how to get rid of those bad habits by creating the opposite condition. This means we want to make our bad habits unsatisfying. By using this technique, we’ll tell our brains that we don’t want to do this action, and we begin to rewire our brain the way we want.
In episode 107, we talk about how to do this along with reminiscing on the scene from New Girl where Nick pays someone to punch him in the face if he doesn’t meet his deadline. It’s a hilarious show, and the character Nick Miller will make you laugh your face off. Below is about a four minute video of Nick Miller being…Nick Miller. Enjoy!
We hope you enjoyed “How to Love Good Habits”, and that you have practical, actionable steps you can take. Be sure to check out this entire Atomic Habits mini series about an easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. You can do this! We’re here to help. Click the affiliate image below to get your copy of Atomic Habits.
