Willpower Alone Often Isn’t Enough When Creating New Habits. Your Brain Offers a Better Solution: Personal Automation

Relying solely on willpower to develop a new habit is often ineffective.

James Clear, the author of the best-selling book Atomic Habits, warns that depending on willpower to form habits increases the likelihood of failure. The human brain isn’t designed to continuously resist comfort and familiarity.

Instead, Clear advocates for creating systems that facilitate the adoption of new habits. This allows you to achieve your goals without depending solely on discipline and consistency. One effective approach to simplify this process is through personal automation.

Habit? What Habit?

One of the best strategies for starting a new habit without relying on willpower is to avoid thinking about the new habit at all. Essentially, you want to automate the habit, much like you don’t ponder when you brush your teeth or what you eat for breakfast every day.

For instance, consider the approach taken by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs or Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (before his change in style). They minimized the number of decisions they made daily by adapting their outfits, which helped lighten their mental load.

Neither Jobs nor Zuckerberg stood in front of their closets each day debating what to wear. Instead, they simply opened the closet and grabbed a pre-selected outfit without the need for mental deliberation.

The brain naturally tends to proceduralize tasks. Habit formation is rooted in brain plasticity. In other words, the brain learns to perform a task through repetition, optimizing it until it can execute it unconsciously and involuntarily.

Do you consciously think about every finger movement when tying your shoes, brushing your teeth, or washing the dishes? Obviously not, because you’ve practiced these actions so frequently that your brain has automated them.

Now, consider your new habit as an automated action you can assimilate without thinking about it. The key to generating that automation is to integrate the habit into a specific routine and follow it in a consistent order. Just as you get up, shower, dress, and eat breakfast in the same sequence every morning, the same principle applies here.

Changing it is uncommon once you’ve established this order, and skipping a step feels rare. It won’t depend on whether you feel like showering or having breakfast that day. You simply do it without thought.

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The Benefits of Personal Automation

One of the greatest advantages of personal automation is the conservation of brainpower. This method reinforces the acquisition of new habits or goals, leaving no room for the temptation to skip them.

Additionally, personal automation can enhance your creativity and problem-solving skills. When a certain action or habit becomes well-established and automated, your brain can go into “autopilot” mode. This allows space for creative thinking and sparking “eureka” moments.

It’s ideal to start small by focusing on one or two tasks that you can automate in your daily routine. For example, if one of your goals is to eat healthier or save money, you might begin by preparing a meal plan for the entire week over the weekend. With your meals planned, you won’t have to think about your diet during the week or stress over cooking to eat healthily.

If you want to start exercising, set out your sneakers and workout clothes in advance, so all you need to do is put them on and run. Searching under the bed for them could easily become an excuse that drains your willpower. Don’t give your brain that advantage.

The key to this technique is consistency and anticipation. Perform small actions repeatedly until they become automatic habits.

Images | Eatée Janssens | Moses Janga

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