Building & Changing Habits | James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to a special New Year's episode of The Drive. For this week's episode, as we are nearing a new year, and a lot of you are probably going to be thinking about your New Year's resolutions, we wanted to re-release one of our most popular episodes, My Discussion with James Clear from November of 2021 James is an entrepreneur, photographer, and the author of the New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. I wanted to interview James after reading his book for the second time, and I realized that it was such an important part of what we try to do in our practice, and of course, what most of us try to do in our own lives, which is change behaviors. And behaviors can easily be distilled into habits. In this conversation, James and I really focus on the four components of what go into forming behavioral habits. We break those apart and we focus on how you can learn new habits or unlearn bad habits. I think you'll enjoy this episode if you've ever wanted to change a behavior or create a behavior, which basically I think is all of us. So without further delay, please enjoy or re-enjoy my conversation with James Clear, and we hope you all have a wonderful New Year. Hey James, thanks so much for making time to sit down today. It's been a while I've wanted to sit down and chat with you.

**James Clear** (2:16)
Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for thinking of me. I'm excited to talk more.

**Peter Attia** (2:19)
I'm trying to think when I first read your book, because I read it twice and like all good books, you get more out of it I think the second time, in part because I think the deeper you get down the rabbit hole of trying to create habits, whether it's in yourself or helping others form habits, the more you realize how challenging it can be. But maybe for folks who haven't read it, because I suspect there's going to be a bunch of people listening to this who have read it, and I want to be able to go deeper for them and think there's going to be some people who haven't read it. Give us a bit of the history as to why this even appealed to you.

**James Clear** (2:50)
Well, first, thank you for saying that. I feel like that's the ultimate measure of whether a book is good or not. Is it worth rereading? That's a high bar. There are many books I've reread, but yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to do it twice. So, what excited me about habits? I think there are a few things. The first is you're building habits all the time, whether you're thinking about them or not. So, depending on which study you look at, somewhere between 40 and 50% of our behaviors seem to be automatic and habitual. But most of the time, those studies are looking at things that are like more or less automatic, brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, unplugging the toaster after each use.
But I think the true influence of your habits is even greater than that because a lot of the time, the behaviors that you're taking are shaped or influenced by the habits that preceded them. So, you can imagine standing in line at the grocery store or having three or four minutes free in your kitchen, and you habitually pull your phone out of your pocket. The next five or ten minutes might be spent thinking carefully about what email you're responding to, or the video game you're playing, or scrolling social media. But that conscious, maybe non-habitual behavior was shaped or set by the habit of pulling your phone out. So, the reach of our habits is very wide and it's influencing our behavior all the time. So that's one reason why it's important. And I think that if you're going to be building habits anyway, you might as well understand what they are and how they work and how to shape them so that you can be the architect of your habits and not the victim of them. A lot of people feel like their habits are happening to them, like they don't get a whole lot of influence on it. And partially, I think it's just because it's this process your brain is going through all the time to try to automate and make behaviors more efficient. But if you don't really know what's happening or where to adjust it, then it feels like it's happening to you rather than happening for you. And then I would say the second thing that really got me diving in deeper and thinking about it more carefully is just the realization that most of us in life want some kind of results. We want to get better at a skill or we want to lose weight or to make more money or reduce stress and gain peace of mind. And whatever the results are that you're looking for, most of the time, your results are a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your nutrition and training habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Even like the clutter on your desk at work or in your garage is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And so habits are not the only thing that influence outcomes in life. You have luck and randomness. You've got misfortune. But by definition, randomness is not under your control. And I think the only reasonable approach is to focus on what's in your control. And over long time horizons, your results tend to bend in the direction of your habits. So I think because your brain is building habits all the time anyway, and because your results are heavily influenced by the habits that you repeat, those are two primary reasons that I feel like got me interested in the topic, but also just good reasons for anybody to be fascinated with habits.