How to leverage “Atomic Habits” this Elul to make the habit changes you want to stick.
It’s that time of year.
Opening the door to crisp cool mornings, kids flying out of the house with snacks and homework in hand, settling in for the long year ahead.
And wondering.
What will the new year bring?
Yeshusos venechamos, we hope. Divine solutions to impossible, intractable conundrums. A new world, not just a return to Hoshana Rabbah of 5784 but maybe, just maybe, the shining, sparkling end to 20 centuries of distance and terror and despair.
We can taste it, feel it just past our searching, grasping fingertips, and we wonder:
If we had known, last Rosh Hashana, what this year would bring… would our Elul have been different?
This year – a gift. After the last water-play day and the school supply sales, the long lines and the cute matching Fall outfits… We have a whole month to turn inward, even for just a few moments a day, and create real, lasting change.
Because You matter. And You can make a difference.

In my work with married women, we often discuss building new habits. I’m a firm believer that without basic self-care – sleep, hydration, nutrition, movement, emotional and spiritual well-being – you cannot possibly show up as your best wife for your husband, your best mom for your kids. We also build the relationship habits that are the foundational building blocks of a healthy, thriving marriage: spending time together, linking bids for connection, holding on to the things that make marriage light, fun, and deeply connected.
Maybe you have one or 2 things you would like to work on this year – whether making yourself a happier/healthier wife or mommy, connecting with your husband, or strengthening your relationship with HaShem. Change is hard, and once the enthusiasm for new practices wanes, it’s hard to remember your good intentions, let alone actually do them. Which is why I love to incorporate the life-altering habit hacks from James Clear’s classic work, Atomic Habits.
In a nutshell, Clear’s research demonstrates that every habit – from brushing your teeth, to your morning caramel macchiato, to turning on music when you get into your car – is built on a cycle of 4 simple steps:


The Cue (I see it), Craving (I like it), the Response ( I want it), and Reward (I got it).
The solution, explains Clear, is to plug in the natural corollaries to these steps to create a new habit… and the opposite to delete a bad one. They are:
- Make it obvious
- Make it attractive
- Make it easy
- Make it satisfying
The power of Clear’s work comes from his reverse-engineering of the actual skills that will harness the influence of the habit cycle, to help you to (almost) effortlessly lock in positive habits – and get rid of unwanted ones. I’m sharing a few of my favorites here.

Step 1: Make it obvious
As you’ve probably learned already, making general proclamations (I will eat healthier food. I will spend more quality time with my husband) rarely works as well as you might wish. Making the new habit obvious can help, and it can take on several surprisingly simple formats.
Habit stacking (my personal favorite), as discussed in this Between Carpools post, is when you attach a new habit to an already existing habit. Think you don’t have any? Every routine action in your day is actually a habit ingrained by practicality and repetition: getting out of bed, washing your face, making coffee, checking the mirror before you leave to work. To stack your habits, simply attach your new habit to the old one:
When I put my feet into my slippers, I will say out loud one thing I am thankful for
When I put up the hot water for my coffee I will do one minute of stretching
When I open up my lunch at work, I will send a cute text to my husband
Another way to make your new habits obvious is to design your environment for success. Want to drink more? Place multiple water bottles around the house. Want to exercise in the morning? Put your workout shoes by your bed, and put them on first thing when you wake up.
Conversely, to reduce a negative habit, make it inconvenient: To reduce your phone time, put your phone in a different room during family time. Or, even better, delete your distracting apps in the morning (or in the beginning of the week), and reinstall them in the evening (or on Sunday).

Step 2: Make it Attractive
Lots of habits that we want to achieve are not immediately fun and pleasurable, so our brain resists them. A great tool for making new habits attractive is to practice Temptation Bundling. That’s when you tie the habit you “need” (the new, harder habit) with a habit you want.
When I sit down in a waiting room, I will first say a perek of Tehillim, then browse my phone
After I exercise for 10 minutes, I will have a healthy smoothie
After I make 3 tzedaka phone calls, I will read an article from my magazine
You can also combine the 2 habits simultaneously, like only listening to your favorite podcast while washing the dishes, or schmoozing with a friend while exercising.

Step 3: Make it Easy
I used to struggle with creating an exercise routine. After all, everyone knows that “real” exercise has to be 20 minutes of heart-rate-raising activity, and who wants to do that? Then I discovered the 2-minute rule.
If you find yourself procrastinating or conveniently ‘forgetting’ your new resolution, try this hack: break down the habit into its smallest possible action, and do that consistently until the habit is locked in. Then, when you’re ready, add time and effort incrementally to solidify your goals.
This hack works great for household chores, decluttering, journaling, davening, and of course exercise. You can even use it to work on spending quality time with each kid individually every day (you might want to start with one kid a day for 2 minutes… we all know that 10 minutes each for 6 kids isn’t happening any time soon!). Or, for a mini-date with your husband, start with a walk to the corner every day after dinner, and eventually build up to going around the block once or twice.

Step 4: Make it Satisfying
When my son was young, he enjoyed doing Sudoku. Then, he received a gift of an electronic device that generated Sudoku games… and he stopped playing. When I asked him why, he said that part of the pleasure of doing a game was the satisfaction of working his way through the book – something that was missing from a device with an infinite number of games.
Most of our desired habits do not provide immediate gratification, but you can engineer your habits to make them satisfying, by creating a habit tracker so that you can experience your successes and progress in a tangible way.
If you want to say one perek of Tehillim a day, always say it from the same sefer, and keep a bookmark or sticky note to track your progress.
A “don’t break the chain” tracker of dots as discussed in this post (connect for each successful day) or grid boxes (fill in the entire box for the day) can motivate you to keep up any daily habit and avoid the trap of skipping “just this one time.”
You can also create sensory and eye-catching trackers, like transferring beads or marbles into a jar (I heard of a baalas teshuva who became shomer Shabbos this way!) For a multi-step daily habit, you can use a weekly twice-a-day medication box, and transfer beads from the AM section to the PM section as you progress. (If you want to reward yourself at the end, feel free – but you probably won’t need to!)
Feeling excited about your options? Start small and slow. Brainstorm a list of likely habits, choose one or 2 of them, and see which habit hacks might work best for you. And right now, create a way to check in with yourself in 6 months or a year – and see what a difference it made. (For fun, schedule an email to yourself at futureme.org – feel free to put in any message you want your future self to read!) To learn more about creating lasting habits and getting rid of bad ones, try out Atomic Habits yourself; it’s easy, engaging reading, and there’s an audio option as well.
Thank you so much for this post! My teenage son is into these things and is looking for precisely such a book. I’m hesitant about non-Jewish authors, though. Is there a book by a Frum author you can recommend? If not, is this book 100% appropriate for a frum bochur?
I have read this book and do not believe that it is appropriate for a frum bochur.
Great post thank you! I always loved this book, so thank you for bringing in down so practical. I love what you said about the month of Elul this year is a gift, how it falls out, a month to breathe, and turn inwards before Yamim Noraim. Beautiful outlook!
Excellent post, it helped me a lot! I read it with pleasure, because I am a student myself, I study, read and write a lot. Sometimes I do not have time to do all the tasks on time, so I turn to write my essays
. This service always helps out, helping with high-quality and original essays. The work is always prepared on time, and the content fully meets my requirements. An excellent choice for students!