“If you’re struggling with temptations or short on self-control, the traditional approach to habit building using willpower will not help you much. You will continue lapsing and struggling, and feeling like a failure. It’s time for a new approach, one that will provide lasting results.” Habits (good and bad) run our lives.
Until now, most strategies for habit formation relied on motivation and willpower. But in today’s world where we are surrounded by temptations, self-restraint and self-discipline have become even harder. In order to build better habits, break old ones and transform your life you need a system not motivational fluff.
Bestselling Author, Joanna Jast’s Hack Your Habits is a must-read that includes expert contributions from Hal Elrod, Stephen Guise, Martin Meadows, and Steve S.J. Scott.
This book is for you if you:
Have struggled with creating healthy or positive habits Experience a lack of self-control and battle every day to maintain your willpower Constantly try (but ultimately fail) to motivate yourself to change unhealthy habits You’ll look forward to learning how to:
Design your positive habits the right way, so you start reaping the rewards from day one. Keep going even if your motivation and energy fails so you don’t lose any forward progress. Minimise the impact of temptations so you never fail again. Implement small changes in your environment to make your new behaviours automatic much faster. Build a system that will help you effortlessly and quickly get to your habit goals so you can transform your life and achieve success faster. Create a powerful, lasting habit change that fits in with your personality and lifestyle and can adapt as you progress through life. Benefit from utilising the free 9-step guide that will allow you to walk yourself through this proven system that will lead you to finally breaking bad habits and have you on the road to thriving. Hack Your Habits is your roadmap to tackling common problems so you can achieve your habit goals faster, with less effort and more enjoyment, finally putting an end to your struggles.
Joanna is a great synthesizer of a vast field of research and advice about getting a grip on your own habits, big or small. She's condensed down the entire habit section of the library into a single, well laid out book. The recommended reading alone is worth the price.
The book has nine simple steps to implement in order to turn bad habits into good ones. There's a free downloadable worksheet which helps you outline your master habit making/breaking plan.
Recommended for anyone interested in turning productivity into a habit.
First of all, I love habit books after having read so many by Steve Scott. But thinking I had read enough to be able to change any habit, I really like this book by Joanna Jast “Hack Your Habits.” I was able to pick up a lot of tactics that I hadn’t seen before in other habit books.
To start with, Joanna dives into the material with why motivation is not the way to build habit change. She gives solid advice on how to use willpower to form lasting changes with habits, and how to set your habits on autopilot for better execution. The course has great colour diagrams to illustrate the "Hack Your Habits" Framework. The book also features an accompanying workbook to use as you are going through the book. Chapter 7 is one of my favourite chapters because it dives into the habit problem and then, chapter 8, setting goals for building the habit.
In PART 4, Joanna gets into designing a habit system through: • Breaking old habits • Finding effective cues • Using habit goals to map out routines • Connecting your cue with your routine for high-end execution
PART 5 is about creating your "Fail & Future Proof" system for success. You will discover:
• How to implement 5 strategies to stop you from failing. • How to kill resistance • How to test, track and Tweet your system.
PART 6 is chock-full of stellar material on how to tackle common barriers for better habit formation. In this section you'll discover what motivates you, how you're motivated, and how to make motivation work for you. You can also learn how to deal with willpower shortages and outages.
“A Scientific Approach to Building Habits” Joanna has given us a different angle on dealing with habits. The book really gets into the science of how and more specifically, WHY habits fail us. Once we understand the HOW habits work, we can focus on the solutions to making them work for us through better positive habits. Also, the more we know about ourselves, the better our results will be. By defining our core character and the habits we stick with, we can develop and customize our course for better success.
In addition, Joanna has done interviews with some TOP performers in the HABIT industry such as Stephen Guise [Mini Habits] and Martin Meadows [Self-Discipline], Hal Elrod [Miracle Morning, and Steve Scott [Habit Stacking]. These interviews add great weight to the book and serve to measure it's authority for building the best habits possible.
The Bottom line on Hack Your Habits… This book is going to become a game changer in building and maintaining solid habits for many people. It doesn’t just rehash all the stuff that is already out there but has been well-structured, well-written, and superbly crafted so that you can pick it up and execute the action plans immediately. I love books that get right into the meat of the material immediately and don’t waste time with long, drawn out explanations. It is written with authority and is definitely a book I’ll be recommending to my friends, family and clients.
When you are like me, you want to have good habits, you’ve tried to develop them, and failed many, many times. And then... you come across this book “Hack Your Habits” by Joanne Jast. It’s a blast!
Jast has a scientific background, and knows how to convince a simple habit failer like me that I do not need to fail. She describes how she struggled with habits herself, and how she learned what worked for her. Joanna Jast does not talk fairy tales!
My greatest “habit problems” for a long time have been around physical exercise, and procrastination. While I kept reading, I saw how I can overcome these problems. Putting this to practice has already benefited my health and productivity.
As you and I know, our motivation in itself never was “strong” enough to change our habits over time. There is no problem when our motives are less “lofty”, like being motivated by money or fame. It’s so important to stay straight and honest with yourself. The author got me to get my motivation for a certain habit change clear, but she certainly does not stop there. She made crystal clear to me why I fail at exerting self-control in the first place. Plus she shows me how to circumvent every pitfall that till now has prevented me from effectively hacking my habits.
A lot of attention is given to the concept of willpower. Jast is ready to assume the worst - that willpower is limited - and from there looks at the best ways of dealing with this fact. One of her suggestions I found “dangerous” to hacking my habits. That is, when my willpower is “used up”, she suggests me to relax with my favorite, guilt-free pass-time. Well, those being sitting in the sun, reading on the internet, chatting on social media and so on... stopping with that type of relaxing activities takes... willpower, at least for me. So, this is a dangerous strategy, and not one I’d recommend.
She suggests us to use our weaknesses as our strengths - for instance the weakness of craving for a break. She lays out a powerful technique, that I now use to my advance.
The book contains lots of common sense, so much that I sometimes realized: I knew that, but couldn’t make it work for me. Now with her explanation and very clear style of writing, she got me working with “the obvious”. With her book, Jast has really got me hacking my habits for the better. That’s why I must give this book 5 stars.
This is the second book I’ve read by Joanna Jast (she also wrote Laser Sharp Focus which was great). This really is a no nonsense guide to getting yourself do the things you want to do. I love how it’s not all about simply getting motivated. Rather it outlines a much more rounded, step-by-step approach. This book is packed with strategies that are backed by science, are in line with modern psychological theories, and have been shown to work.
The 9 step “Hack Your Habits Framework” is clear and sound. I really found the sections on hacking your environment to set you up for almost automatic success refreshing. The author goes out of her way to deal with essentially any type of resistance or barriers that may come up and show you how they can be dealt with.
If you’re struggling to keep motivated with an important habit, whether it be a new diet, exercise routine, or any type of self-improvement plan, this is the book you want to read. The accompanying workbook is extremely helpful and free, allowing you to make the most out of the book.
For those of you who’ve read and liked my book (ACHIEVE: Find Out Who You Are, What You Really Want, and How To Make It Happen), you’ll find this book is an excellent complement to it.
Want to make changes but short on self control and will power? This book gives you the tools to help you do it AND without feeling that it is an almighty battle with yourself. It gets you onto autopilot so that your chosen new good habit becomes your norm. Joanna’s advice doesn’t just tell you that you have to get motivated or use your will power, but gives you a practical system for creating new habits or breaking old ones and integrating them into your life, so that you don’t have to rely on willpower. There’s a lot of thought gone into this book and it requires you to reciprocate. Make no bones about it - it's a lot of work! But there’s no doubt that if you do the work and follow through the steps, you can successfully create a new habit and more importantly, stick with it. And you can use the system over and over again to achieve goals you didn't think you could.
This is a brilliant guide! What I love so much about Joanna's books is that she is not trying to motivate me. I do not lack motivation but I am often stuck in a rut. Sometimes without realising it. It is this awareness which makes all the difference. And then Joanna goes through the steps of how to, little by little, we can replace the habits with better ones. This works because her research is based on human psychology and tried tests and methods. There is no airy fairy 'thinking-it-all-good.' Her books are based on science and work really well for me.
Thank you Joanna, I appreciate your work because it is making a positive difference in my life. Following the instructions in the last book gave me back many hours in my day. I cannot wait to get going on fine-tuning this even more.
This book was full of well researched, proven and practical ways to create new habits, change bad habits to good and keep habits going. I especially liked the discussion around internal and external rewards and motivators as I could then see where I was going wrong with my exercise habit. Having a handful of chapters written by other habit authors was also something different and added some interest into the book. If you want to improve your habits, then this book is for you.
Practical and useful advice on habit building. Soft habit building in other words habits we would like to create where instilling the practice is more important than performance and schedule trumps deadlines. She offers systems to bypass (or more appropriately work with an individual’s character and circumstances to minimise the reliance on motivation and willpower. It’s a neat summary of the field with plenty of examples and a free workbook. However, it felt a little long and sluggish at times.