Help Teens Build Better Habits

James Clear’s book, “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Ways to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones,” explores the underlying principles of habit formation and destruction and explains in simple steps how to change them. Intended for readers who have an appetite for altering their own habits, the book also provides tools for parents whose children need help adjusting theirs. If 40 to 50 percent of daily behavior is a function of habits, as researchers suggest, then these automatic actions can alter the shape of a life.

There are four essential ways to build the habits you want: “make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.” To shed a bad habit, consider the inverse: “make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult and make it unsatisfying.”

Suppose a 14-year-old wants to be more disciplined about exercising after school. Most days, the teenager flops on the couch and scrolls through her social media when she gets home. In this case, she wants to replace a bad habit (scrolling) with a good one (going for a run.) To make the desired habit obvious, she might put her workout clothes right by the door she enters. This new context—clothes right there—is the cue to change and go. To make it attractive, she might try what Clear calls “temptation bundling,” attaching the sought-after habit with something she already enjoys. For example, if she likes listening to podcasts, she can stack that habit (listening to podcasts) with the one she avoids (exercising). To make it easy, she should start small, by exercising for just a short amount of time; when building new habits, it’s the consistency in carrying them out rather than the duration of the activity itself that makes them stick. Finally, to make it satisfying, she can reward achieving that goal with some small incentive that reinforces her new, desired habit. A week of daily exercising might warrant a pedicure or massage, for example.

Another teenager longs to give up junk food. He can start to make this food invisible by storing the chips and cookies in a high cupboard, out of sight; just catching a glimpse of the Chips-A-Hoy is a cue to eat them. To make the snacks unattractive, he can consciously reflect on the drawbacks to filling up on food created in industrial-sized vats and consider the advantages of giving up processed confections. To make it difficult, he might up the “friction” between himself and the food by keeping it out of the house entirely, so that the only way to give in is to travel to the grocery store. And to make the habit unsatisfying, he can conspire with a friend to report back if he slips up. The social cost of admitting the weakness taints the habit further.

The four steps Clear proposes are grounded in the science of habit formation. A four-part feedback loop occurs unconsciously in the brain and compels much of our behavior: it starts with a cue, which prompts a craving, then triggers a response, which provides a reward. Clear’s system for creating new habits and eliminating old ones manipulates the cue-craving-response-reward cycle to generate the sought-after behavior change. Teenagers are famously striving to figure out who they are. “The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself,” Clear writes. Working to develop habits that align with their burgeoning identities can help kids in that discovery.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services