It has been three years since I read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and shared my thoughts on it. I know a lot of people treat it like a religious text (based on the angry comments that post gets), but I personally wasn’t impressed, and it had no new or useful advice in it for somebody like me, for whom rigid routines and habit trackers just do not work.

I found James Clear’s 4 Laws (cue, craving, response, reward) only effective when it comes to really simple tasks like brushing my teeth after I pee when I get up in the morning, or cleaning the cat litter out while my porridge microwaves, so I don’t forget to do it later. Basic little chores that do not require much effort, or depend on my mood and energy levels.

His advice does not help with anything more complex than that! Trying to build a regular exercise routine or making time to study non-fiction depends on too many other complicated psychological factors that impact my delicate motivation. I also find it really hard when a 40-hour work week leaves very little precious free time, energy or mental bandwidth to do everything that I want, or should, be doing.

This is all to say that in 3 years, my opinion on the worth of that specific book has not changed. But I think as my understanding of myself and my motivations has increased, and I think I can see the many nuances when it comes to building and keeping habits for exercise routines in particular.

1. Consistency = Something is better than nothing!

This is the most important lesson, and it took quite a long time for this to click because I guess I’d subconsciously absorbed so much of the fitness industry’s all-or-nothing, no pain no gain, messaging. I definitely took Clear’s “don’t break the chain” advice in the same vein as this.

Consistency is just making the effort to try to do the thing, even if you aren’t feeling your best and maybe you don’t have it in you. Sometimes your 100% is walking instead of running, or 5 reps instead of 10.

For me, this is putting on my running clothes and just seeing how much I’ve got in the tank that day. Sometimes I have nothing, and I end up walking most of it; sometimes I can complete the run, and on rare occasions I manage to break a personal best. Other times, usually when I have my period, or I have had poor sleep, just putting on the running clothes gives me a strong feeling that it just isn’t a good idea to do this today. That counts as trying too.

The same applies to strength training and to reading. Some days I pick up the book or article, get out my notebook and pens and then notice after 5-10 minutes that my brain is just not going to be able to absorb and process anything else that day. That is ok, I made the effort to try.

2. Slow Progress Is Still Progress

I have been jogging consistently for over a year now. For me, consistency is looking like an average of about 2 times a week for 20 mins, and I can only just about run for 20 minutes without stopping to walk and recover (and only if I ate and slept well, I am not close to my period, and I don’t go the uphill route). I don’t think this rate of progress, after a year, is going to impress most people!

But I am happy with this because I couldn’t run for 10 straight minutes a year ago! Sometimes I go for a run, and I realise that I can run the whole stretch of road with the slow uphill incline without stopping, and it felt quite easy, actually. There are times I catch myself in almost a flow state running, which 5 years ago would have been unthinkable to me.

So my running skills are improving at a snail’s pace, but they still are improving, and they’re improving in such a way where I only have to expend the amount of effort that feels comfortable to me… so I don’t push myself to a point where I hate doing it, and I stop!

I’m also applying this thinking to my learning and reading more non-fiction. It took me a month to read the 300 pages of How To Be Perfect, but I fucking read it! I finished it. I learned new things.

Slow is fine. Slow is still moving!

3. I Am Not Goal-Orientated

Goals do not motivate me; I don’t know if they actually work for other people? I was reflecting on this in my PDR the other week, where we have to set SMART goals, and I realised I always find them impossible to come up with, and often forget all about them until a 6-month review. My motivations are internal; I just need to feel like I’m doing a good job and that I’m working to my potential.

Having a loose goal in mind can be helpful, but achieving it is not going to be the thing that motivates me. My long-term goal for running is I’d like to be able to run for 5K without having to stop and walk. Mainly because that seems like a good and efficient cardio workout, and Park Run is 5K, so if I decide to try joining that for the social element, I’ll feel more comfortable. But I’m not putting any deadlines or time limit on it that would add pressure.

4. Doing The Thing Should Be Its Own Reward

I think because goals are not my thing, something that categorically does not work for me is habit tracking. It just doesn’t motivate me, never has, and I don’t think ever will at this late stage! I might stick to it for a week with an initial burst of enthusiasm, but soon I forget to do it, and then the logging just becomes like another chore. I end up with a half-filled, sad-looking tracking chart, which ultimately demotivates me!

Also, trying to train myself like a dog (or a child) by giving myself a treat as a reward for doing the thing doesn’t work either. I tried this with the Conqueror Virtual Challenge medals, and it was effective for a couple of months – and I was excited to get my Star Trek medals (the medals are very cool) – but a year later, I am well over it, and honestly, logging progress in that app has become a bit of a chore and I resent it nagging me!

Instead, I try to be mindful of how doing the thing is improving my life and making me feel better. This is noticing progress and writing it down in my journal, which makes me feel good. It’s appreciating the times when I go for a run in lovely weather and the sun on my skin, and the air and blood pumping through my body feel amazing (this is rare, but it has happened!).  It’s remembering that strength workouts do really boost my mood, and are fun! It’s going for a Sunday morning run in the spring around the lake with all the rhododendrons in bloom, seeing the other runners and feeling a part of the world. Sometimes I take a photo on these days as proof!

I do combine exercise with entertainment, though, which is a little bit of motivation, but mostly to distract myself from how boring exercise is. I run with audiobooks, and I usually work out to a TV show on the iPad, audiobook or podcast, but that is to stop my brain from focusing on how repetitive and dull working out is.

5. Keep It Simple, Stupid

Making it easy is something James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits, but he talks more about pre-planning and building an environment for yourself that makes doing the thing easy – like an exercise room, or keeping a tidy desk so you can just sit down and write. Those things definitely do help – remove all the barriers you can – but another part of this is to minimise any mental blockers as well as physical ones. This is something I tend to trip myself up on. I need to be able to do the thing without having to think about what I’m doing.

With running, this is just go and run for x amount of time, and don’t pay any attention to any of the metrics in my Garmin fitness tracker and don’t try to follow any fancy training plan. I’ve tried training plans 3 times, and it never works out because I’m shit at sticking to a scheduled routine (because of work/weather/menstrual cycle), and it all gets confusing and messed up because I keep skipping or rescheduling the workout… then it just causes me unnecessary stress.

With strength training, I recently realised I’d created more barriers for myself by planning to do 3 workouts a week that focused on different areas – upper body, lower body and then full body. Most of the time, I could complete the upper and lower body ones, but I never managed to get to the third workout because I was too sore. And another complication was that this plan had alternating weeks as well. This meant every week I felt like a failure, and also I was getting confused about what I should be training and not progressing. 3 different workouts were too complicated!

I now have a simple plan that has 2 different yet simple full-body dumbbell workouts that I just alternate. So it doesn’t matter if I do 2 or 3 workouts a week; it’s just either A or B. This is fine for me for now because I’m not training for anything specific, it’s not serious, I just want to build and maintain muscle so I don’t end up a frail old lady. I also used Claude AI to help me plan this, so I didn’t spend hours of my life getting overwhelmed by trawling the millions of fitness blogs and YouTube videos that are how I ended up with an overcomplicated plan to begin with.

5. Listen To Internal Cues

Atomic Habits recommends building cues for your habits to be triggered by a time of day, location or action and stacking these to follow each other. This is good for things like when the alarm goes off, so you now get out of bed, go to the bathroom, pee, and then clean your teeth. This works for simple things like that, but what I’ve started to realise for the more difficult stuff that needs motivation is to pay attention to my internal cues.

So this is having the thought that it is a nice day outside and going for a run would be really pleasant, and then harnessing that thought to make sure I take a longer lunch to go for a run while it is still sunny (as long as I don’t have conflicting work). Or noticing that today I’m in a playful mood and I have more energy than usual, so let’s use that! Realising I am thinking about stuff and having ideas, so I should get my notebook out to write them down (I might work up to carrying a pocket notebook)!

I’m starting to think that this is maximising the reward I get from doing it – I actively wanted to do it, so I was more open to enjoying it, and I probably will enjoy it more! I can use this fact – that sometimes doing this thing feels good – to reassure me on the low motivation or low energy days when it feels hard and bad.

Conversely, if I am having a terrible day and trying to force myself to do the thing – running, strength training, reading non-fiction – genuinely feels like it’ll make me feel worse (sometimes it does), then I let myself off. I do this because I don’t want to have too many negative experiences in my mental bank, and I do not want it to end up being a chore! This is cause of being honest with myself over whether I’m making up an excuse or if my body and/or brain really isn’t up for it today.

Basically… I treat myself like a Sim in Sims 4. Do the thing when inspired to do it for the skill boost, maybe don’t do it if I have too many negative moodlets.

6. A Routine Habit Doesn’t Have To Be Scheduled

I have never been able to stick to strict routines for my free time. Trying to portion out my day or week for specific activities never works; I do not stick to it. It is not how I want to live my life. When it comes to exercise, I have assigned alternating evenings in the work week for strength or running, but that’s about all I do.

I am trying to focus on learning this year and reading more non-fiction, and trying to retain the ideas. Currently, I’m learning about moral philosophy and reading the London Review of Books, I’m enjoying both, but struggle to find the time to focus. Trying to say that Tuesday and Thursday evenings I dedicate to study time doesn’t work for me because I might not be in the mood, work may have zapped me, or there might be something else going on.

What I have got better at doing is, after dinner, just checking with myself how I’m feeling, and if the hour-ish I now have for free before bedtime will feel best spent studying or relaxing with some more TV or a video game. More often, I will use the time to read and study, but some nights I just need to switch off to recharge, or I want to work on my embroidery. So I suppose my routine now is to ask myself what is going to be the most beneficial choice. Over the last couple of months, I’ve realised that this is a little routine I run in my head in my free evenings, instead of defaulting to just watching TV and scrolling on my phone. This is probably a totally normal thing that everybody does, but it has helped me to think about it this way!

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I think ultimately what I know now is that what works for me is to be more gentle with myself, and just inch along like a chilled out snail so I almost don’t notice the effort until suddenly I realise that I am now the person who goes jogging without having to psyche myself up, and about 50% of the time I even get enjoyment from it. Maybe in another 2 years of tiny, slow improvements, I’ll be regularly running 5K.

An important part of this is not to compare yourself to other people, especially people on social media. People are not one size fits all, so what works for me might not work for you. Find a bare minimum that works to get you just doing the thing, and increment from there.