The disappointing worldview of Atomic Habits

A book I really wanted to quit

Feb 20, 2023

Notebook with a coloured habit tracker page for journal, meditation and yoga. Coloured markers in the background. — Photo by Prophsee Journals on Unsplash.

CW: discussion of how prevalent weight loss is in the book Atomic Habits.

The description of Perfectly Cromulent states that I’m a “self help optimist in a pessimist’s world.” What I mean by this, among other things, is that I’m usually game to find something positive and useful in a self help text, even if it’s surrounded by various forms of nonsense.

In other words, I’m good at ignoring the bits I don’t like

and mining the little gold nuggets that might be available. Some books, though, make this very hard, even for an optimist like me.

Atomic Habits, by James Clear, was one of them.

Honestly, I had high hopes for this book. I was looking forward to reading a massive bestseller that seems like a go-to text in the self help world. Indeed, it’s often billed as the definitive book on habits. And if you’ve read this newsletter for a little while, you know I love habits! Habits are one of my superpowers. Atomic Habits should have been right up my alley.

Unfortunately, I had a tough time sticking with this one until the end. If I hadn’t been planning to write something about it for this newsletter, I might have even quit halfway through. It felt like an uphill battle to get through a lot of the stuff I found objectionable in order to find some bits of solid advice. Those that I did find, I’d encountered elsewhere. And just when I thought I was getting to the end of the slog, the last section took a turn for the worse.

What did I find so hard to get through in the main chapters of the book? The relentless use of examples that were all about weight loss, exercise, cutting calories, “fitness,” and “health.” This is not a book “about” diet and exercise, but the author’s choice of examples was heavily skewed in this direction. You could come away from this book thinking that these are the most important things to be preoccupied with as a human being.

Clear has a history as an athlete, and this is a recurring theme in the book. So I guess it’s not surprising that working out, going to the gym, “being fit,” and so on figure heavily in the way he thinks about habit formation (and the way he assumes everyone else thinks, too).

Moreover, given the rampant fatphobia

of our culture and its obsession with thinness, weight loss, dieting, and exercise, stuffing your book with lots (and lots and lots) of examples that touch on these topics is probably (and sadly) a good way to sell just about any piece of self help. This is a topic I plan to explore in more detail in a future newsletter. Stay tuned!

But Atomic Habits should come with a warning label for anyone who has ever struggled with the body shaming, fatphobic, calorie-obsessed world we live in. I found it nearly impossible to “read past” all of this, and I’m one of those people who does have a daily exercise routine that I worked hard to make a habit. I’m not exaggerating when I say that these themes appear in his discussion of all his habit-forming steps and strategies.

Even when the author offers up other examples of habits to be formed or broken, I found there was an assumption that some habits were unquestionably good, and some were unquestionably bad. Obviously, everything to do with working out, eating less, and “looking good” was lumped into the “good” category. “Bad” habits included watching Netflix, being on your phone a lot, and of course, eating an extra snack.

If I momentarily set aside my anger with the fatphobia, I’m still left feeling like this is a pretty judgmental take on habits. Whether an extra hour of TV (or most other habits) is “bad” depends entirely on your unique lifestyle, your goals, and your needs. For someone who is a workaholic (and would like not to be), maybe setting the habit of watching a little extra TV is beneficial for meeting goals like relaxing, enjoying leisure time, and working less. James Clear gestures to this idea at some point (that habits are contextual), but in general he seems to assume that everyone will just agree on which are habits we need to break or keep.

A point in its favour is that after reading this book, I decided to delete TikTok from my phone, since I had to be honest and admit that the garbage content it showed me was far outweighing the bits I enjoyed. #RIP my status as the member of my friend group who knew what young people were talking about.

It got worse

As the remaining page count dwindled, I felt my mood lifting. The feeling was short lived. The final sections of the book took a wholly unnecessary (in my opinion) turn to genetics as a “guide” to deciding which habits we simply shouldn’t waste our time on.

Unsurprisingly, Clear starts by talking about two elite athletes in different sports, whose body types (specifically, the relative lengths of their torsos vs. their legs) have (likely? maybe?) contributed to their success in their respective disciplines. He offers this anecdote in order to suggest that we, his readers, should heed our genetics and not try to force habits that we’re simply not genetically built to succeed at.

Where to begin with this nonsense? First, how many of James Clear’s average readers are Olympic athletes, or people pursuing “habits” so extreme that a couple of centimetres of hand length are make or break? Even if we accept that genetics plays an outsized role at the far ends of human physical accomplishment, what does this have to do with the kinds of habits that most of us regular people are working on? I highly doubt genetics has much to say about whether I can successfully remember to take a vitamin every day.

Clear makes the somewhat misleading claim that genetics plays a role in just about every trait observed in humans. Of course, DNA creates the blueprint for what’s possible in our species. But what Clear leaves out is that for the vast majority of traits, including things like height, there is no simple genetic formula. Many genes are involved in even “simple” physical traits, and for complex behavioural traits, it’s even more, well, complex. And that’s before we even consider the effect of our environment and upbringing on our capabilities.

For Clear, even personality is largely immutable and based in biology. He uncritically deploys the so-called “Big Five” personality characteristics (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) that have been used for some time now to influence everything from research agendas to employment practices to policy-making. Clear then suggests that you should build habits that work for your personality.

I agree with this in the sense that it helps to know yourself well as you set about forming new habits. For example, if you want to get into the habit of listening to more music, but you’re very sensitive to loud noise, it would follow that going to live music venues might not be the best way to cultivate your listening habit.

However, the Big Five is a pretty simplistic and not nearly-so-universal-as-advertised way to understand personality. New research has found that this model “doesn’t seem work for people in low- and middle-income countries. […] even in Western countries, it may only work for specific age groups.”

Ultimately this section of Atomic Habits felt like an unneeded distraction, one that undermined what useful advice James Clear had to offer by suggesting that maybe it’s pointless to try to start or stop certain habits. Would he tell a “neurotic” smoker for whom “addiction runs in the family” not to try quitting because there might be a genetic component to addiction and their anxious personality keeps them tied to their habit?

As I switched Atomic Habits from “currently reading” to “read” on my Goodreads list, I was sad that a useful methodology for setting habits was buried under layers of the most tired and cliched examples centered on exercise and weight loss. My kingdom for a book about habits that is not an active participant in this culture of fat shaming! I know it’s difficult to write about eating and moving our bodies in ways that don’t replicate this BS. That’s because anti-fatness has over saturated those topics such that we struggle (myself included) to find the vocabulary to discuss them outside of the dominant frame of reference. But could we, like, try??

This is one of those aspects of self help that challenges my ability to sniff out the truffles amongst the dirt. It’s a big part of the reason why I can never uncritically embrace even the elements of self help that I enjoy. Maybe this stuff doesn’t bother you as much and this whole newsletter has come off as overwrought and too sensitive. If that’s the case, it might be worth wondering why it’s so easy to accept, why it seems so normal to focus on these things, and what messages it’s sending to us about where our priorities should lie when it comes to improving our lives.