Habits Are Overrated

This is a post about how people overemphasize the importance of habits. And when I say people, as always, I mean me specifically and cross my fingers and hope that this applies to other people. I suspect that, since Atomic Habits was so popular, that other people also have this problem, but it’s possible that it covered this and I’m the one behind. If so, I’m sorry for doubting you James Clear.

What do I mean people overemphasize habits? Well first of all what is a habit? Yes yes it’s that trigger, context, behavior stuff blah blah blah. Here I’ll treat habits as tools to do regular things you want to do when you don’t feel like it or wouldn’t otherwise remember to. (I’ll mainly be addressing “good” habits here, but you could equivalently think of “bad” habits as a tools that help you do things you don’t want to do even when you don’t feel like it.) You won’t always feel as motivated as you did the day you decided to start going to the gym.

The conventional habit formation wisdom all takes this optimism into account. It states that you should start small and focus on one or two new habits at a time. Yes when you’re motivated you feel like you can do everything all at once, but as soon as you have a mildly busy day, it will all fall apart, and breaking the habits will only make you feel worse.

I want to make it clear that all this is good advice. If you’re trying to form a habit, this is the best way to do it. Furthermore, habits are a valuable technology. There are many activities–eating well, exercising, practicing skills come to mind–that show the most benefit when done consistently.

But that’s not to say those activities confer zero benefit when done sporadically. No you won’t get six pack abs from hitting the gym once, but you might feel better. Maybe you’ll sleep better. At the very least it will be slightly easier when you do start the habit.

I want to make it very clear that I’m not advocating that you put a lot of effort into forcing yourself to do things that you haven’t formed habits for yet. That’s what leads to burnout or ego depletion or whatever. Rather, when you are motivated to do something, you shouldn’t let the principles of habit formation talk you out of it. For a contrived example, you wouldn’t say no if a cute girl asked you to the gym with her just because you were already forming a habit of learning ASL. (Unless she was deaf and you needed more time to learn some phrases to impress her.) It probably wouldn’t even cross your mind that a one-off gym trip could ruin your other habit or lead to burnout because that’s ridiculous. So what’s the difference if, one day, while learning colors in ASL, you feel like you want to go workout.

At the latest, you should do things when you’re motivated to do them. Habits are for doing things before you’re motivated to do them, not an excuse to do things later.