James Clear: Building & changing habits

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is James Clear. James is an author, entrepreneur and photographer. He is 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, at which point I picked up even more from it the first time and I realized this is 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 lives, which is change behaviors, and behaviors can really be distilled into habits. In this episode, we talk about his background, why this is an interesting topic to him, but mostly we just dive really deep into the four components of what goes into forming behavioral habits. And then of course, breaking those apart, how can you unlearn or learn de novo new habits? So I think you'll enjoy this episode if you've ever wanted to change a behavior or create a behavior. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with James Clear.
Hey James, thanks so much for making time to sit down today. Been a while I've wanted to sit down and chat with you.

**James Clear** (1:59)
Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for thinking of me. I'm excited to talk more.

**Peter Attia** (2:02)
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** (2:33)
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 10 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 cause, 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 kind of feels like it's happening to you rather than happening for you.