Build a Habit Guide

★★★★☆

The Build-A-Habit Guide: A Research-Backed Program to Make Habits Stick by “Made by Therapists” (2023)

The Build-A-Habit Guide book cover

Writing in an orange book with an orange erasable pen. Never before seen levels of aura.

Is this a book blog or is it a random blog where I use the current book as an excuse to jump into whatever tangent I feel like?

I got this book from Indigo for $40 and now it’s on sale for $20 and I am salty about that. Why buy anything, ever, from Indigo?

I like the design. A faint circle into a solid circle. It’s a bold unapologetic orange. The texture is some kind of rough-feeling cloth, pretty unusual for even a self-help book. Comes with a ribbon bookmark and a wrapper on the back cover that you can also use as a bookmark.

Is it worth $40? I don’t know. There’s a lot of free resources online about forming habits.

Is it worth 1/3 as much as one single therapy session? I’d say yes, without question. Not that therapy is bad (Although I hate how normalized it has become to say “X needs to go to therapy” as a patronizing insult, and the assumption that if you don’t like it, you just need to try the second or third or dozenth therapist until “it’s a fit.”)

The book itself is a ten-week guided journal about how to form new habits. At the beginning it guides you on how to pick a habit that’s likely to succeed, such as one that feels rewarding immediately and not weight loss.

The first four weeks are pretty detailed, and then weeks 5-10 get one sheet each. A full quarter of the sheets is like this:

  • Did you do it today?
  • And how did you feel about that?
  • And what did you learn from that?

With a “NOTE FROM THE EXPERTS” at the bottom, which I quite like. There’s a different note each day, and there’s a sense of progression among them. If you took them all and distributed them at random, it wouldn’t make sense.

It does require a time commitment every single day, no skipping. I noticed that the days I skipped the habit were also the days I tended to skip logging it.

So why does this get four stars even though my review isn’t glowing? It’s had the greatest impact on my life of any book I’ve read this year. I now make a more concerted effort to train my bird at least once every day, whether that’s right after dinner or before my shower. Better if you chain it beside something you already do as a habit.

None of that is groundbreaking, and you can do any of it for free.

One downside of bird training as a habit is that it changes day-to-day, because my bird is (presumably) making progress. Shall we try step up method number fifteen now? How about a new trick? Or a day where I’m not allowed to make any sounds, only hand gestures. Fine for a week, fine for a month, but what about one hundred months? What shall I do then, when I run out of ideas? I figured I should probably make a training plan before the session, but that’s two habits so why do that.

I think the branding helps a lot. They’re experts, you’re safe in their hands. By spending the money, you feel like you have to squeeze value out of it somehow. If you force people to pay a lot for your advice, they’ll be more likely to follow it. Overall the book lowers the activation energy slightly, and that’s worth $40 to me. Getting started is the hardest part.