During my recovery, I read a pile of self-help books. Though, if I am honest, I think using the word ‘read’ is probably fairly generous. What really happened was that I ordered books off Amazon, skimmed through them and then shelved them neatly beside the last victim of my inability to concentrate.
In this blog post, I am going to discuss a few concepts from James Clear’s Atomic Habits, (which I have read far more thoroughly since recovering!) and try to do the thing that I often failed to do in my own recovery, even if I did persist with reading a book I had ordered. That is, put it’s wisdom in a recovery context and then apply it to my recovery.
As I discussed in my last series of blog posts, gaining insight without subsequent action is something we so easily fall into the trap of doing when we have a change to make. I hope this blog post helps filter down some of the most important points from the book to provide a tangible action pathway. Whether you’ve read it yourself or not, my goal is to condense Clear’s wisdom and put it in a recovery context ready for you to apply.
Just to note, I think this blog post will seem most relevant to those of you who consider your eating disorder to be one looping ED-OCD behavioural matrix. If you have no idea what I mean by that, this blog might not be for you. If the OCD element of your ED is what you have concluded is the key maintenance factor of many disordered behaviours, read on!
A Summary of Atomic Habits
In a very tiny nutshell, Atomic Habits is centred around practical strategies for making consistent changes that lead to eventual growth.
A framework called the ‘Four Laws of Behaviour Change’ is suggested to be a useful tool to help create good habits and break bad ones.
How To Create a Good or Bad Habit:
In order to create or break a cycle of regular tendency – what we refer to as a habit – Atomic Habits describes how we must address the 4 stages of a habit loop: The Cue. The Craving. The Response. The Reward.
To do this, he proposes that we utilise the ‘Laws of Behaviour Change’.
In order to make a habit, we need to:
1) Make it obvious.
2) Make it attractive.
3) Make it easy.
4) Make it satisfying.
Conversely, in order to break a habit, we need to directly invert these:
1) Make it invisible.
2) Make it unattractive.
3) Make it difficult.
4) Make it unsatisfying.
When you read that first list of laws, I wonder if it may suddenly become clear to you why some of your current (disordered) habits have nestled themselves into your life so deeply. I know it did for me.
Let’s say you have the same (or similar) cereal bar every day and you have a goal to change it up. Let’s now assume that you’ve had in your mind to something else, like a couple of slices of peanut butter toast, perhaps.
Let’s also assume that you’ve been able to make this change once or twice, but as soon as you’ve done it a few times you fall back into the pattern of having your bar and the peanut butter toast doesn’t remain a constant.
Fear of weight gain aside, why not?
If I look at this scenario, and many of my own habits which were similar, it actually seems quite clear. If we look at the criteria for maintaining a habit, it is no real surprise to see why you’ve been resistant to change from the bar:
The bar is obvious – you have 9 of them hoarded in your cupboard and they are the first thing you see when you open it.
The bar is attractive – it’s probably a bar you quite like the taste of and perhaps takes you to a satisfactory level of fullness that you have grown used to feeling comfortable with.
The bar is easy – you unwrap it and it’s done. Already portioned. No fuss.
The bar is satisfying – you are done and dusted with the snack-time without any further thinking required and are ‘rewarded’ having a ‘peaceful’ head having stayed within a comfort zone (or comfort pit, as I like to call it).
Meanwhile, in addition to perhaps fearing a weight gain ‘consequence’ of changing, now have a think why your eating disorder might try to suggest peanut butter toast is not a simple tendency loop to keep at, especially if you are on the fence with your level of recovery commitment:
The toast option isn’t so obvious. It’s invisible. The bread requires toasting before it becomes toast. It’s not the immediate thing you can ‘just grab’ when you open the cupboard. The bread goes off quicker too, so perhaps it’s not even in the house at all and would require a supermarket run.
The toast option isn’t fully attractive, or easy, nor satisfying. Perhaps when you’ve had it in the past, you used a scant portion of all-natural nut butter that made the snack come out nothing like the one you loved as a kid. You might wonder if it also might leave you hungry after. And are concerned it might get cold quickly. Or be harder to drag out the eating experience of than the bar. Or might create more mess. Or take time you don’t have. Or might require a toaster you don’t have access to. And all of those very valid sounding excuses that your ED can grab onto and present as a litany of reasons to just stick with the bar for today.
Days pass, weeks pass and even months pass and the change from the bar still haven’t been made and the habit cycle of keeping peanut butter toast in rotation hasn’t been established.
So, What To Do?
To finish out this blog, I am going to list a few directly recovery-focused things that you could do to make a new positive habit or break an old disordered one. This will involve lowering the effort of pro-recovery actions and increasing the effort of disordered actions, so they aren’t so simple to slip down.
Bear in mind that there will likely be other reasons that you are holding onto behaviours besides just habits (e.g., fear of weight gain/ fear of caloric change). However, I still think there is importance in Clear’s logic for many reasons, a few of which I want to outline.
First, there was a time in my recovery that I had
accepted the idea that I needed to gain weight to an unsuppressed point and there wasn’t an overt fear of weight gain holding me back.
Though I was promised that this would be the key to my recovery, by the point that I wasn’t so frightened to just let my body be, my brain was so entangled in habit cycles that my autopilot was just disordered – almost without reason. In any case, the reason for the behaviours certainly didn't feel like the reason they were established. This might sound incomprehensible to somebody who has never had an eating disorder, but for me, it was like the foods I ate and behaviours I did fit like puzzle pieces in my brain. They soothed me just because they were unchanging, rather than because they suppressed my weight. New behaviours felt like trying to jam a puzzle piece into a space it didn’t somehow fit.
I do also think these changes are important since even if you do have conscious fears, the only way these are to be relieved is by getting yourself out of the habit to enforce a change to the behaviour anyway.
How could you make a pro-recovery change obvious?
Look for ways to cue or prompt your desired behaviour.
o Keep the cupboards full of recovery-wise foods.
o Keep recovery-wise foods in full view and visible (e.g., On the kitchen surface in a basket/box, at the front of the cupboard, in boxes of abundance around different rooms of around the house).
o Use action prompts to initiate new behaviours (e.g., Write ‘remember to grate plenty of cheese’ on the packet of pasta or tin of baked beans).
o Put your book on your pillow, so that you read that when climbing into bed, rather than scrolling through your phone and finding yourself down a harmful internet rabbit hole.
o Make visual cues around the house (or on your phone background) to remind you of your unconditional permission and intentions (e.g., to respond to mental hunger or to engage in discomfort).
How could you make a pro-recovery change attractive?
When building a new habit, if we make it something we look forward to, we’ll be much more likely to actually do it.
o Ensure the food you are eating is as nice as it can be! Allow it to be cooked in all of its richness with all of its frills (e.g., if you are having a peanut butter bagel, don’t use a shitty bagel thin and powdered peanut butter that you’ve had to reconstitute with your tears).
o Arrange to challenge yourself whilst being with somebody who makes you feel safe
(e.g., meet up the friend who makes you laugh).
o To go to a nice location for the challenge (e.g., your favourite café or park).
o Make the resting comfortable and cosy – don’t just sit twiddling your thumbs (e.g., Buy yourself a nice book, or perhaps some comfortable clothes to chill in, or maybe some new body cream).
o Associate it with a reward (e.g., reporting your win back to a member of your support system who you know will be your cheerleader, or celebrate a certain recovery milestone with a special activity)
o Use temptation bundling by pairing something you have to do (the recovery action) with something you want to do. (e.g., eating from a chocolate share bag whilst going to the cinema with a close friend).
How could you make a pro-recovery change easy?
In Atomic Habits, Clear advises using a two-minute rule. Taking this into account, try to do as much of the prep as you can before it comes to the time of doing the behaviour, in what will likely be the moment your sympathetic nervous system is activated.
o Prep in advance and remove steps required in the fear moment (e.g., prepare the sandwich in advance and then all you have to do is pop it in the toastie maker when it comes to lunchtime. Or, grate the cheese that you will have on top of your pasta for lunch as soon as you wake up, so all you have to do when it comes to lunchtime all you have to do is grab it and tip it on. Or pour a large unmeasured portion of cereal into a Tupperware the night before and place it on the kitchen surface to ensure you do actually follow through with changing your breakfast this time).
o Grocery shop with your recovery partner so you are supported or do online food orders when the ‘threat’ isn’t immediate and your are in your parasympathetic nervous system.
o Use your insight about your eating disorder’s common ploys and tricks to plan for likely barriers (e.g., pre-grate cheese if you know that your ED will use some silly excuse like not wanting to wash up the grater, or that you don't have enough time).
o Throw away old clothes that you know you shouldn’t fit into.
o Break down goals which seem unsurmountable into actionable steps forward (e.g., if the task seems too ominous that you feel reluctant to take a step forward, begin with a deluxe milkshake before you try the quadruple chocolate freakshake).
o Work with an accountability partner, coach or multi-person support system.
How could you make a pro-recovery change satisfying?
o Commit to the change – you will feel an authentic sense of recovery pride if you follow through with a challenge without side-stepping it.
o If this is your thing, create a visually aesthetic tick list or progress tracker.
o Journal your experience, creating a record of your progress.
o Read through your recovery motivations to reaffirm how the action you just took allowed you to move closer to living the life you ultimately want to live.
o Tell people who will give you the reassurance or cheerleading you need to hear to keep you motivated.
How to make a disordered habit invisible.
o Remove the objects that lead to disordered behaviours. The kitchen scale. The bathroom scale. The trainers. The smartwatch. The calorie tracking app. The clock. The same old crockery. Put them as far away as possible. Better still, ask somebody else to hide them so that they can’t be retrieved.
o Stop buying safe foods and remove hoarded stores of disordered foods.
How to make a disordered habit unattractive.
o Highlight the benefits of avoiding the bad habits e.g., return to your motivation list.
How to make a disordered habit difficult.
Increase the friction and number of steps between you and the bad habit.
o Stop buying the disordered foods. Keep them in the supermarket.
o Tell other people about your disordered habits so they will challenge you on them. For example, if you find yourself buying certain items continuously that are limiting your progress, invite others to call you out.
o Remove stashes of hoarded disordered foods.
o Move your ‘go-to’ options your of immediate sight.
How to make a disordered habit unsatisfying.
o Commit to recovery. Using disordered behaviours becomes unappealing once you have decided on giving this your best shot.
o Get an accountability partner who can watch and check-in with your behaviours.
o Make a commitment to be honest so that you would have to report using a disordered behaviour when confronted.
I hope those lists help provide you with some actionable steps to take in the coming hours and days as you establish a system for your recovery changes.
In my next blog, I plan to pick up on 3 more concepts from Clear’s book that I think are also useful to apply to your recovery.
Whenever that may be, see you then. Thanks for reading!
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