Atomic habits to trick your brain into doing hard things
Studying every day after school. Going for a run three times a week. Reading a chapter a night. These are the kinds of goals that sound simple when you set them and somehow never get done.
The problem is usually not the goal itself. It is getting started. We share four ways to trick your brain into doing the hard thing, most of them drawn from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Why hard things are hard to start
Your brain likes easy. It prefers tasks that run on autopilot, the things you have done so many times you do not need to think about them. Scrolling your phone, snacking, lying on the sofa: these take almost no effort, so they win whenever you give your brain a choice.
A hard task, on the other hand, asks for effort before you have seen any reward. So your brain looks for a way out, and “I’ll do it later” is the easiest one available.
The ideas below do not try to make you tougher. They make the hard thing look easier, so your brain stops resisting.
1. Take small steps
Reading a whole book sounds daunting. But what about one page? What about one paragraph? Running five kilometres sounds exhausting, but a slow jog around the block does not.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear calls this the two-minute rule: shrink the habit you want down to a version that takes two minutes or less. The point is not to only ever do two minutes. It is that two minutes is easy enough to start without a fight, and starting is the hard part.
Something interesting often happens once you have started. After reading that one page, you think: “That wasn’t so bad. Why not finish the chapter?” After two minutes of revision, you are already in the flow of it, and carrying on feels much easier than starting did.
Try this: take the task you have been putting off and shrink it. “Revise Maths” becomes “do one question”. “Read my book” becomes “read one page”. Do only that, and give yourself permission to stop afterwards. Most of the time, you will not want to.
2. Just get ready
The second trick is closely related. Instead of telling yourself to do the task, tell yourself only to get ready for it.
- “Play basketball for an hour” becomes “put on my basketball shoes”.
- “Go for a run” becomes “put on my running shoes and step out of the door”.
- “Study for an hour” becomes “take out my notebook and open it to the right page”.
You are not asking yourself to do anything difficult. You are just getting ready. But once your shoes are tied, going out to play is the natural next step, and once the notebook is open on your desk, writing the first line is too. Getting ready removes the gap between thinking about a task and doing it, and that gap is where most procrastination lives.
Try this: set up your study space the night before. Leave the book open at the right page, with a pen on top. The next day, all you have to do is sit down.
3. Practise, practise, practise
The first two tricks get you started. What makes things easier in the long run is repetition.
Nothing becomes easy without effort. If a run leaves you exhausted today, doing it two or three times a week, consistently, will make it easier over time. A study routine that feels like a struggle in the first week feels normal by the fourth. Each time you do the hard thing, you make it a little easier to do again, until it no longer feels like a decision at all.
The key is consistency, not intensity. A short session done every day beats a long, heroic one done once and then abandoned.
Try this: track your habit on a calendar or in a weekly planner (made for P6, works for anyone). Put a tick on each day you do it, however little. After a week or two, a row of ticks becomes a reason in itself to keep going.
4. Change how you talk about yourself
The last idea is about the words you use. How you describe a goal to yourself affects how your brain sees it.
Say you tell yourself, “I want to read for at least 30 minutes a day.” It sounds positive, but underneath, it says something else: that you do not read for that long now, and that you are not really a reader. And if you are not a reader, why would you read?
Compare that with telling yourself, “I am a reader.” Now reading is not a chore you are trying to force on yourself. It is simply what someone like you does. When you are tempted to spend two hours scrolling, you can ask: “Would a reader do this?” If the answer is no, you know what to do instead.
James Clear calls these identity-based habits: rather than focusing only on what you want to achieve, focus on who you want to become. Every small action then becomes a vote for that person.
The same works for studying. “I need to study more” feels like a burden. “I’m someone who does a little every day” is something you can live up to.
Try this: choose one identity you would like to grow into, such as “I’m someone who reads every day” or “I’m someone who keeps up with homework”. Next time you are deciding what to do, ask what that person would choose.
Start today, and start small
You do not need more willpower to do hard things. You need to make them look easy enough to begin. Shrink the task, get ready rather than get going, keep showing up, and start to see yourself as the kind of person who does it.
If procrastination is the bigger problem, our note on five ways to beat procrastination covers distractions, to-do lists and rewards.