Barley a lifestyle

Atomic Habits Helped Me... Until Life Got Loud

 I read Atomic Habits by James Clear a couple of months ago🕮. You know, that life-changing book everyone swears by—the one that promises you can transform your life with just 1% daily improvement😇. 

Honestly? It’s a really good book… if you actually do it.

 And I did. For a while. 

 I followed the rules✅. I started small✅. I stacked habits✅. I was drinking water like a wellness influencer and feeling proud for doing a quick morning meditation. I even attempted journaling—again. I have about seven half-filled notebooks to prove it. (They now live quietly in my desk drawer like shy roommates who know I’ve given up on them.) 

 The thing is, I do have habits I’ve managed to stick with—like flossing and taking off my makeup every night. Those are automatic by now. But habits like meditation or journaling❓ They tend to vanish the moment life starts throwing curveballs⚽. When my brain gets overloaded—when I’m stuck in deep thoughts, real stress, or just the everyday pressure of figuring out life—thinking about a two-minute breathing exercise is not the priority. 

I don’t know how other people do it. How do you stay mindful and composed when your mind feels like a full browser with 28 tabs open and three of them playing music? To be fair, James Clear isn’t wrong. Psychology backs him up: habits are built through cue-response repetition in consistent environments (Lally et al., 2010). 

And Atomic Habits does a great job of breaking that down into digestible, actionable steps.👏👏👏

 But when your “environment” becomes total chaos and your thoughts are doing cartwheels, the only cue I recognize is "panic"—and that one doesn’t lead me to journal. It leads me to snacks. And no, I’m not planning to reread Atomic Habits. It's not a bad book—it's just not one I want to revisit like a motivational manual on loop. I got the point. I just sometimes misplace it… along with my keys and my peace of mind. 

 So I’m genuinely curious—how do you keep your habits going when your mind is completely occupied? Are you the kind of person who still writes in your journal during a personal crisis? Or are your notebooks living in the drawer next to mine?

 Let me know—how do you live when life gets loud?✍✍✍✍

 References:

 

• Clear, J., 2018. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. New York: Avery.
•  Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C.H.M., Potts, H.W.W. and Wardle, J., 2010. How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), pp.998–1009.