Making Sense with Sam Harris - #200 — Creatures of Habit

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with James Clear about habit formation. They discuss the difference between creating good habits and discontinuing bad ones, the role of the environment, the misalignment between immediate and long term outcomes, the remembering self vs the experiencing self, goals vs systems, the compounding of incremental gains, the role of attention, the four laws of behavior change, “temptation bundling,” and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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No questions asked. and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, today I'm speaking with James Clear. James is the author of the book Atomic Habits, which has been repeatedly recommended to me. Many of us go through life aspiring to acquire good habits and aspiring to lose bad ones, and we treat that process as though we're fundamentally mysterious. But as it turns out, some people have thought a lot about habit formation, and James is certainly one of those people. So I wanted to get him here

on the podcast to talk about it. Really, anything you want to accomplish in life that depends on your behavior in any sense is almost entirely dependent on the kinds of habits you can form. Whether they're around work, or diet, or fitness, or relationships, or a practice like meditation. It's really all a matter of acquiring good habits. And now I bring you James Clear. I am here with James Clear. James, thanks for joining me. Hi, Sam. Good to talk to you. So you wrote this book, Atomic Habits, that was recommended to me many, many times before I picked it up. It's a great analysis of habit formation

and what it takes to discontinue bad habits and form good ones. And there's a lot of detail here that I want to get into, but you have an interesting personal story of how you came to this. You had an experience of having to rebuild your life in an impressive way. Maybe we should start there. How did you come to think about habits and how was this forced on you by the whims of chance? Right.

Well, I grew up in a family that played a bunch of different sports. My dad was a professional baseball player. He played in the minor leagues for the St. Louis Cardinals. And I played a variety of things growing up, and sports played a big part in my childhood. Until I was about 16, and the final day of my sophomore year of high school, I suffered this very serious injury where I was hit in the face with a baseball bat. And it was an accident. A classmate of mine took a swing and the bat slipped out of his hands and sort of rotated kind of helicopter style through the air and struck me right between the eyes. So broke my nose,

broke the bone behind my nose, your ethmoid bone, which is like fairly deep inside your skull, shattered both eye sockets. I looked down, I had spots of red blood on my clothes. I had one classmate who literally took the shirt off his back and gave it to me to kind of plug up the blood coming from my broken nose. And I was sort of unaware of how seriously I had been injured. You know, everybody's running over to me. We kind of started making the long march down back into the high school. We were on this field outside of the school. And I got to the nurse's office and started to answer questions, but I didn't answer them very well. And I think the third question they asked me was, what's your mom's name? And that took me about 10 seconds to answer. And that was the last thing that I remember. So the swelling in my brain got to the point where I lost consciousness, you know, taken out of the high school on a stretcher,

went to a local hospital. When we got there, I started to struggle with basic functions like swallowing and breathing. A couple minutes later, I lost the ability to breathe on my own. So they had to intubate me. Nurses are pumping breasts into me by hand. Around that time, I had my first seizure of the day. I'd end up having three more. And so the doctors conferred and decided it was too serious to handle at the local hospital. So they had to air care me to a larger facility. So my mom came with me on the helicopter. I'm unconscious at this point. She holds my hand the whole way down. We fly to this larger hospital in Cincinnati and we land on the

roof of the hospital and a team of, I don't know, a dozen doctors and nurses come out, wheel me into surgery, take my mom off to a waiting room where she meets back up with my dad. And as I was getting ready to undergo surgery, I had another seizure. And so I guess they decided that I was too unstable at that time. So they placed me into a medically induced coma. And around this time, a priest comes up to my parents and actually this particular facility, this particular hospital, they were familiar with it because about a decade before, my sister had been diagnosed with leukemia at the age of three. And this was the same hospital where she had received her chemotherapy treatment. So it turns out it was the same doctor or the,

sorry, the same priest that had met with them a decade prior that they also talked to that day. Thankfully, the story, you know, has a good ending. So I spent the next day in that medically induced coma. About 24 hours later, my vital signs had stabilized to the point where doctors decided to release me from the coma. So I wake back up and the process of healing sort of begins. And this, the reason I tell this story, the reason I think it's related to the discussion we're having now is this was a time in my life, you know, all humans have habits. I mean, we're building them from the time that we're born, but this was the first time when my hand was forced

and I had to start small. You know, I didn't have a choice. I couldn't just flip this switch and go back to the normal, young, healthy person that I was before. All I really wanted was to get back on the baseball field, get back to, you know, living my normal life. But my first physical therapy session, I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line. I couldn't drive a car for the next nine months. I had double vision for weeks. And so I started by just doing these small, simple things that almost now, like as I talk to you now, it almost seems insignificant. You know, like I went to bed at the same hour each night or prepared for class for an hour each day. This is the first time in my life after physical therapy was done

that I started training consistently in the gym. So, you know, first once or twice a week, and then eventually three or four times. And they were small habits, but they gave me a sense of control over my life again, something I felt like had been ripped away. And so gradually, I started to build confidence, rebound, recover. I never ended up having a successful high school baseball career. I got was the next year when I went out for the team, I was cut was only junior to be cut from the varsity team. Senior season, I made the team barely got to play. But I did manage to kind of weasel my way into a college team and continue to build those small habits and get better. And so my freshman year, I came off

the bench. Sophomore season, I was a starter. Junior year, I was a team captain. Then my senior season, I ended up being named to the Academic All-America team, which is about 30 players around the country. And I never played professionally, but I do feel like I was able to maximize my potential and kind of make the most of the circumstances that were pushed my way. And I think that's really kind of the lesson for many of us with habits and the role that they play. You know, I kind of broadly see three major pillars or things influencing our outcomes in life. I mean, you got luck and randomness, which by definition is not under your control. You have your habits, the behaviors that you practice and the actions that you take, and you have your choices, the strategy that you follow. And you can't control luck and

randomness. But if you can control the other two, if you can make good choices and build good habits, then you can often kind of get luck to sort of go your way, you can increase your surface area for good things to happen, despite the randomness that that comes along. And that's kind of I feel like the punchline of my story. You know, I don't really know that there's anything legendary or heroic about it. We all face challenges in life. And this was just one that I faced. But it did teach me about the importance of small habits and how they can help you rebound from challenges if you're willing to stick with them for, you know, months or years. found obvious from the start? Or was there a period where you kind of tipped into depression or despair and took some significant period of time to even find your way toward growing your way out of this predicament? Well, the first thing I said when I woke back up and sort of was cognizant of what was going on was I never asked for this. And I think a lot of people feel that way when challenges kind of come their way. It's like, you know, why me or stuff like that. So I'm sure that I did have

a period where, you know, it was hard. Looking back on it now, what I remember is trying to be very positive about it. There's this interesting, I've been thinking about this more recently, maybe you've seen this in your own life as well. There's this, they're like positive and negative feedback loops throughout life. And there's this, this interesting thing where stuff kind of feeds on itself in either direction, you know, like you're a little bit overweight and that makes you feel a little depressed. And so then you feel like sitting on the couch more and eating your feelings away. And then you get more overweight and just kind of this downward spiral. And then the same is also true on the upward side, you know? And so I, for whatever reason, I think as I was rebounding from that, I tried to focus on some small win, some little

foothold that I could get to push off of and move the momentum in a positive direction. So maybe, you know, that first physical therapy session, that was something like, you know, being able to successfully complete each exercise or to do the number of reps that were prescribed from the physical therapist or whatever. But that is a very small, tiny thing, but gave me a little foothold. And I could use that to propel a little momentum into the next thing. And weirdly, if you're willing to do that, if you're willing to look at life that way and to continue to try to drive that momentum, you do sort of get this flywheel effect over the course of a couple years. And pretty soon you're almost surprising yourself by what you're doing. And I think that small habits do sort of compound on each other in that way.

I'm struck by the fact that many of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about habits per se, but we think about our lives, we think about our relationships, we think about our health, our finances, our careers, the distance between our moment-to-moment experience and the experience we imagine we want in life. And when you look at that distance, when you look at the quality of any aspect of our lives, we are quite obviously inheriting the consequences of our habits moment to moment. And yet it's, I mean, often it's once a year, it's at the New Year's resolution moment that people think about actually getting behind themselves and pushing to change something they're doing in their lives or not doing. How do you think about a habit? How would you define habit?

Well, there's a couple of different ways to define it. The way that you would usually hear it defined is, you know, a behavior that's been repeated enough times to be more or less automatic. But I think there are a couple of other interesting lines of attack or lines of explanation that reveal a little bit more about it. So they are these automatic, relatively mindless behaviors, almost like you're playing a cognitive script. You know, you like pick up your toothbrush and then you play the toothbrushing script, or you put your shoe on and you play the shoe tying script. But another way to define a habit would be a behavior that is tied to a particular context or environment. So I think that's kind of interesting because it reveals that you cannot have a behavior outside of an environment. So I think that's kind of interesting because it reveals that you cannot have a behavior outside of an environment and habits are often heavily influenced by the

environment that we're in. So like your habit of watching Netflix might be tied to the environment of your couch at 7 p.m. or your habit of journaling each morning might be tied to the coffee shop across the street at 10 a.m. or whatever. And so those behaviors linked to the context around them, I think that's another interesting way to think about it. And then the third way, there's a researcher, behavioral economist too, I think his name is Jason Rea. And anyway, I like the way that he defined a habit. He said something to the effect of, they are solutions to recurring problems in your environment. And I like that idea because you could imagine, for example, somebody comes home from work and they're exhausted. So you kind of have this recurring problem around, say, 530 each

evening where you're feeling sort of exhausted and stressed and tired from the day. And the brain wants to come up to with solutions and automate those as best as possible. So one person might fall in the habit of playing video games for a half hour, and that's how they do stress. And another person might smoke a cigarette, and a third person might go for a walk with their spouse. And you can start to see that even though the underlying or root cause is the same, or similar, we can come up with very different solutions to that same problem. And so I think to a large degree, people sort of stumble into their habits, sometimes literally stumble into them. Like we just stumble across a solution

that this happens to be the information that came your way throughout life. Often you're imitating the habits that your friends or your family or your parents or somebody, what they do to solve that recurring problem. So you sort of inherit the habits of the people around you. And then at some point you get to be 20, 25, 30 years old, and you have to like step outside and above yourself and realize, okay, I have all these recurring problems, these things that come again and again that need to get resolved throughout my life. And I have this set of habits that I use to resolve those problems. But what are the odds that the habits that I have now are the optimal solution to the problems that I face repeatedly?

It's probably very unlikely in the universe of options that you have that you happen to come across the ideal solution at first. And I think as soon as you realize that you start to see that your habits are more of your responsibility now, you know, it's your choice as an adult, how you respond to these recurring problems. And if you have the option to build habits that solve those things in a healthier or more productive or more fruitful way, then that's your responsibility to try to build those. So I think all of those different lenses give you kind of various ways of describing a habit and what it is, but that's kind of roughly the role that they play in our lives. Is there a difference that you can generically state between acquiring a good

habit and discontinuing a bad one? Is there different dynamics to that problem? Yeah, that's a great question. So first, I should say, I think it can be very useful to look at your bad habits because, and I think we all have had this experience, bad habits seem to form so readily, so easily, and yet good habits can be kind of difficult to build and to last. I think it's interesting to ask, like, why is that? What qualities of a bad habit make it so readily formed? And so there are quite a few insights that I discussed in Atomic Habits that sort of came from that opposite lens, from looking at the inverse. So I'll discuss some of those in a few minutes as we kind of get deeper

into the conversation. But to answer your question, what's the difference between a good habit and a bad habit? Some people are like, well, if it's bad, why would I do it, right? Like if I know this isn't good for me, why do I keep coming back to it? And depending on which experts you talk to, some habit experts don't even like the terms good and bad because they're like, well, all behaviors serve us in some way. So they, I don't know, there's kind of this philosophical or semantic discussion about it. I don't know that that's quite right. It goes back to Socrates, essentially, that no one knowingly does bad. Everyone has a story about why what they're doing is good, at least for them.

So I think there is truth to that. But from a practical standpoint, from a useful standpoint, I think we can define what a good habit and a bad habit is. And the way to do it is to consider that behaviors produce multiple outcomes across time. So broadly speaking, let's say there's like an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome. Now, the immediate outcome of most good habits is, or sorry, most bad habits is pretty favorable. Like the immediate outcome of eating a donut is great. It's sweet. It's sugary. It's tasty. It's enjoyable. It's only the ultimate outcome. If you keep repeating that behavior for a year or two years or whatever, that's unfavorable. Same story kind of with like smoking a cigarette. The immediate outcome of smoking a cigarette is, you know, maybe you get to socialize with a friend

outside the office or you curb your nicotine craving, or you take a break from work or reduce stress. It's only the ultimate outcome that's unfavorable. With good habits, it's often the reverse. Like the immediate outcome of going to the gym, especially that first week or first month, not very favorable. Your body looks the same in the mirror. Scale hasn't really changed. If anything, you're sore. It's only the ultimate outcome a year or two years from now that is favorable. And that misalignment between the immediate outcome and the ultimate outcome, I think, is one reason why it's so easy to slide into bad habits because they feel good in the moment and can be difficult to build good habits because a lot of the returns are delayed.

And I think this comes back to some sort of evolutionary wiring. I mean, for the vast majority of human history, humans have lived in what scientists would call an immediate return environment. Almost all of your choices had some kind of immediate or near-term impact on your life. Do I take shelter from a storm? Do I run away from the lion? Do I forage for berries in that bush for my next meal? And then now, really just the last 500 years or so, you know, we could debate exactly how much time, but relatively short in human

history, we live in this modern society where a lot of the greatest returns that we get now are actually a delayed return environment. You go to work today to get a paycheck in two weeks, or you go to class today to get a college degree two weeks, or you go to class today to get a college degree in four years. You save for retirement today so that you can be retired and free in a decade or two. And so we have this weird shift where increasingly the payoff of delaying gratification or of making long-term choices is greater and greater because the institutions and society and culture we've set up. And yet our paleolithic minds seem to be wired to prioritize the immediate outcome. And so I think all of that together helps explain sort of what the difference is between a good habit and a bad habit. What does that behavior get you in the long run, the ultimate outcome?

And also why it's like kind of easy to build bad habits and fall into them, slide into them so readily. So I like to summarize that by just saying the cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future. And I think that kind of helps describe the difference between the two. Yeah, that's really interesting. It relates to a few other issues we should discuss here, and that is the difference between focusing on goals and focusing on process, because that has significant consequences. And also, there's just this distinction. I know you're familiar with Danny Kahneman's work, and he's famous for many things, but one of his useful distinctions is between the remembering self and the experiencing

self. And the experiencing self is your moment-to-moment experience of your life, and just integrating all the data under that curve is what it's like to be you. And if we could ping you randomly 20 times a day an experience sample from you you asking you how you feel. In each moment, we would get some measure of what it's like to be you, and you'd report back your well-being, such as it seems to you, in a window that's very focused around the present moment. But the remembering self is who comes online when anyone's asked how they feel about their life in a much more global, how they feel about their life in a much more global retrospective sense. How's your career going? How are your relationships? And it's the remembering self that is the one that tends to make decisions about what to do in life, what kinds of goals to pursue, in this case, what

kinds of habits to rethink and try to change. And there is, you know, Danny has noticed and more or less surrendered to this fact that there is a reliable mismatch between the remembering self's account of what is good and what is worth doing and who it's becoming and what its life is like, and the experiencing self's data that can be reported back. So you can think you had a terrible time over the last week, but the sampling would say otherwise and vice versa. And he thinks there's really no way to get the remembering self and the experiencing self into true harmony. I have my doubts about that. I mean, we have a sort of an ongoing disagreement on this front, but I'm wondering what you think about this distinction between what you're doing with your mind when you're making some kind of global

assessment of who you are and how it seems and where you want to go and what it's like to be you really moment to moment throughout your life and then how this relates to this effort to change habits and whether we could prioritize a focus on goals where we want to get to versus a focus on process or the kinds of systems we create to produce certain results. So let me take the remembering self versus experiencing self first, and then we can come to the systems and goals piece. Yeah. So all of Kahneman's work is very interesting. And my main takeaway from a lot of these discussions, and you'll hear him say this as well a lot of the time, basically it comes down

to like, you will not be the exception. We'll talk about all these biases and just knowing about them does not shield you from them. You still can be the victim of all of these things. And so my practical takeaway when it comes to building habits is you don't want to go against the grain of human nature. You want to work with it. And that's one reason, for example, a large part of my philosophy is around making good habits the path of least resistance. Because what you find is that regardless of what your remembering self or your most strategic self would think, if you sit down

and try to design out your ideal day or remember what your best performances are like, the truth is moment to moment when you're sitting there and about to make the next decision, we often choose what is easiest or what is the path of least resistance? What is the action that requires the least energy? And so we want to design environments, design a lifestyle and situations that make those good actions as easiest and as obvious as possible. And so for that reason, I think that's kind of my main practical takeaway from it. There are a lot of interesting, you know, theoretical or things to just kind of consider. Some of the discussion about the remembering self versus experiencing

self reminds me a little bit of, I think Ray Dalio has like a little division where he basically says like, you're both the strategic controller of your life and you're the in the mix like operator as well. You know, you're both the CEO and the frontline worker. You're both the general and the soldier. And sometimes we kind of alternate back and forth between those selves. And I think what the best plan that the general can come up with is often very different than what it's like to be on the battlefield as the soldier. And I don't know. I don't know how it may be possible to get those fully aligned, which is what you're kind of hinting at. Even doing so might be very hard or maybe it's fleeting.

That's kind of how it feels to me is that occasionally I have moments where I can glimpse that and it's like how I'm acting or what I'm thinking in the moment is maybe more aligned with what that remembering self would say. But then I get distracted or my attention goes somewhere else or somebody walks in the room or a new project arises and I had it, but I had it only for a moment, almost like chasing a state of flow. It's different than flow, but it's similar in the sense that it doesn't last all the time. So I don't know. That's just, those were kind of my thoughts off the cuff about it, but happy to talk more about the systems and goals piece as well.

Yeah. Let's segue to that. So how do you think about the difference between a focus on goals versus a focus on systems? And one thing that jumps out to me is that goals are really just ideas. And even when they're realized, I guess there are different kinds of goals and some can seem more durable than others, but many are, even in their moment of fulfillment, are enjoyed very briefly. I mean, let's say you decide to, you know, you form the goal that you want to run a marathon, and then you run your first marathon. Well, you know, that took, you know, if it's your first, it probably took, you know, five or six hours, but however long it took, the moment of fulfilling it, of crossing the finish line who trained for the marathon and hopefully continues to like running thereafter. So they're very different in terms of duration.

And most of life is clearly the process. And our goals are these brief landmarks on the landscape of our moment-to-moment living. But I know from your book, there are other consequences to focusing on one versus the other. So how do you think about goals and process or systems? So yeah, that's a great entry point to this discussion, this point. This is one of the core ideas in Atomic Habits, which is that you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And the reason I bring that up or feel like it's such a central thing is that often when people discuss behavior change, when they

talk about habits that they want to shift, it usually is centered around some kind of goal. They start with like, oh, I want to lose 40 pounds, or I'd like to double my income, or I want to reduce stress. They have some kind of outcome that they want. I want to reduce stress. They have some kind of outcome that they want. And so the implicit assumption behind that is if I can just achieve this thing, then I'll be the kind of person I want to be. Then I'll have, you know, the life I want to have. And so there's this focus heavily, heavily, we are heavily focused on outcomes, but, and this sort of comes back a little bit to what you mentioned near the beginning of the conversation where you said, you know, we have habits all the time, but we don't think about them that much. And yet they're kind of in the background influencing all these outcomes that we have.

And so the way that I would describe that is most of your outcomes in life are lagging measure of your habits. So, for example, your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Your bank account is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your physical fitness is a lagging measure of your eating and training habits. Even the clutter on your desk at work or in your garage or your bedroom is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And so if you get really motivated and set a big goal, like I have the goal to clean my room, and then you spend a couple hours doing that, you have a clean room for now. But if you don't change the sloppy, messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first place,

then you turn around two weeks later and you got a dirty room again. And so we often think that the outputs are the things that need to change, but it's not really the results that need to change. It's like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. And that's kind of this language of systems versus goals. I first heard that specific phrase from Scott Adams, but you hear it in many different ways, process over outcome, whatever, it's been discussed ad nauseum for centuries. But to put a little finer point on it and to link it back to habits, this is how I would describe it. Your goal is your desired outcome. It's the thing that you want to achieve. Your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. And if there's ever

a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, there's ever a gap between your system and your goal, your daily habits will always win, right? Like almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. Like whatever system you've been running, let's say the last six months or last year, whatever collection of daily habits you've been following have carried you inevitably to this place that you're at right now. And, you know, there again, you know, I mentioned this earlier in the conversation, there are, of course, other forces, right? There's luck and randomness and so on. But I think largely speaking, we could say that that is true, that you're that the things that you repeat day in and day out, the system that you run

carries you to this outcome. And so for the all of those reasons, I think we should focus much more on the daily habits on the system than we do on the goal and the outcome. And as you mentioned, there's sort of these downsides or, you know, these negative effects that come from focusing too much on the goals. So the first one is that, as you mentioned, achieving a goal really only changes your life for the moment. You know, like it's only it's only a momentary thing. It doesn't make, it's not like, this is one of my challenges when people talk about like a 30 day challenge for habits or, you know, 21 days and then the habit is formed or whatever. It's like habits are not really a finish line to be crossed in that sense. You know, they're not, it's not like just do this for a little while and then you'll be a healthy person. Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. The second thing though, and I thought this was so interesting when I first came across

it, is that the winners and the losers, so to speak, in any given domain, they often have exactly the same goal. So, you know, say you're at the Olympics and you've got 25 people competing in an event. Presumably all of them have the goal of winning the gold medal, right? It's not the goal that makes the difference in their performance. Or if you have a job opening and a hundred people apply for a job, presumably all of the candidates have the goal of getting the job. And so a goal might be necessary, but it's not sufficient for success. What you really need is the daily habits, the preparation, the behaviors that lead to that outcome. Now that I've criticized goals a little bit, I should say I do think they can be useful and two of the things that I think they can be useful for. So one is clarity, setting a sense

of direction. If you have a clear goal, you know what direction you want to row in or in the case of a team, what direction you want the whole team to row in, get everybody on the same page. And I also think they're useful for filtering. If you have a goal and somebody comes to you with an opportunity and they say, Hey, would you like to join or work on this project? Or can I interest, you know, are you interested in this? You can run it through that filter of your goal. And it's easier to say no, if it's like, Oh no, that doesn't help me achieve my goal. But short of that, I think that it's much more useful to focus on the habits in the system. And most of the time we probably spend, I don't know, 80% of our time, let's say talking about

outcomes and goals and what we want to achieve and what the future should look like. And I think it should be flipped around. It should be, that's fine. We know where we want to head. Now let's put the goal on the shelf and focus instead on the system and the daily behaviors. ahead. Now let's put the goal on the shelf and focus instead on the system and the daily behaviors. Yeah. And another way to merge these two ways of thinking is to recognize that the real goal that you want to achieve, a more rational goal, is to find a way. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.

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