Why it’s essential
Want to build better habits? This easy-to-understand listen written and performed by distills complex information from psychology, biology, and neuroscience into actionable advice.
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What is Atomic Habits about?
is a step-by-step guide to breaking bad habits and implementing more positive habits by way of small, incremental changes. The book's main thesis is that tiny actions, which may seem unimportant in the moment, actually have tremendous effects on a person’s life when compounded over time.
Editor's review
Editor Madeline loves memoir, literary fiction that tackles the existential, and all the sapphic stories she can get her hands on.
As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m a person who tends to get caught up in emotion. I feel sometimes like a walking whirlwind of feelings, an open nerve, my days often changing drastically depending on the rise and tide of my moods. I pay attention to my intuition and believe deeply in the things we cannot see. It is for all of these reasons, that despite this book being recommended by friend after friend in the year following its release date, I avoided reading it. "It’s too practical," I thought. "It’s too X + Y equals Z." Snooze.
Fast forward to April of 2020—a few years since the book’s initial boom—and I am feeling sluggish and supremely unproductive in a pandemic-induced haze. In my now-virtual writers' group, we chat about what we are all reading. One member perks up, looking a bit more alert than the rest of us, and credits Atomic Habits by James Clear for taking her out of her creative slump and helping her feel a sense of control in this eerie moment we all found ourselves living in.
I can’t say what it was, exactly, about this particular recommendation that drew me in. Was it the time frame or the sense of calm I felt emanating from this usually chaotic person on the other end of the screen? Or was it just that I finally decided to listen to what people were telling me? Either way, the next night I decided to download the audiobook, which is narrated by the author. About 20 minutes after pressing "play" on this book that seemed to have been following me for years, popping up all over the place like meerkats in the jungle, I wished deeply that I had listened sooner.
