1% better every day? Fact or fiction? Let's put it to the test this winter break.

Atomic Habits by James Clear is one of the best books for insight into the minute details of your life that compound into situating your happiness. Little, sixty-second rituals compile into 1,440 minutes in a day, which ultimately can define our success or lack thereof.

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As I depart school for break at home, these habits become doubly important to me. When forced to depart the ritual, routine and safety of school life in favor of hometown situations with my parents, habits help prevent life from spiraling out of control. We’ve all been there, high school friends, boyfriends, teachers and dentists all seem to emerge from the woodwork when we return. Each one brings out a different version of the person that we once were. Paired with the monotonous feeling of uncertainty on how to relax after fifteen weeks of grinding towards our goals, the bad influences of free time can lead to hours downed in rabbit holes that cause feelings of anxiety, discomfort and disappointment.

Don’t misunderstand, rest is tremendously important. There is a time and a place for relaxing and down time, however, habits can be our barrier to falling apart during the massive shifts in routine, safety and normalcy that we experience during this down time. So, lessons from James Clear can help us prevent that feeling of being upended by these changes to routine.

James Clear is a proponent of becoming 1% better every day. He created a very complex mathematical formula with logarithms and weird figures to explain it, but the bottom line of this parable proves that improving by such small margins daily ultimately will get you further than either becoming worse (i.e. sitting on the couch for eight hours a day over break) or better (i.e. relaxing with your family, but also prioritizing those things like running or reading that you maybe didn’t have time for before).

Habits, as Clear says, are not going on a run every day. Yes, you can get into daily exercise as a habitual action, but it's time to look more deeply. Habits are the little things in our daily life that often happen subconsciously, like rolling over for your phone instantly when you wake up, or the need to lay in bed for an extra forty-five minutes, then wonder why your screen time is so high. He says that each of our actions can lead to aspects of our identity, so taking pride in the little ones can help us grow pride in ourselves.

Take, for example, a clean room. I’m a super messy person by nature, but imagine if I got into the habit of taking my clothes and folding them or hanging them every day. My room wouldn’t get dirty because of my clothes, so eventually, wouldn’t I become a cleaner person? Cleary says yes. However, this mindset of breaking down and understanding our habits also involves taking some actionability and responsibility for who you are.

According to Cleary, who you are is a belief, and changing your habits to maintain a self image that is consistent with those beliefs is crucial. Decide the person that you want to be, he says, and prove it to yourself with those small wins.

Perhaps what is most scary about our habits is the reward system that we have gratified our brain with recently. The rise in social media has been rewiring our brains to crave a different kind of reward system--one that is self-serving to the apps that profit from the amount of time that we spend there.

But just like any perpetuating cycle, habits are fueled by reward systems in our brain. Simon Sinek talked about this reward system in depth in his book Good Leaders Eat Last, saying that we are rewarded by the small chemicals of serotonin and dopamine in our brain that are naturally triggered by the systems set up on social media and our phones to keep us there. This is what translates into our behavior when creating habits.

So, to keep a good habit, make it obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. For bad habits, it is as simple as putting these steps in reverse: make it invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying. Clear explains that the cravings that we feel today are caused by ancient desires, such as seeking connection in social media, or prestige in video gaming. In each of these ways, habits are simply learning to give our brain satisfaction.

Finally, considering that reinforcement and habit stacking are the best ways to make changes in our lives, we must consider how our brain can be trained to accept gratification. When we’re at home, the lack of structure means that we have more opportunity to collect instant gratification from bad sources. If we don’t have to stop a bad habit because it’s time for class or the gym, or because our friends arrived, there’s nothing to force us to notice it is happening. So, when we’re home it's doubly important that we learn to recognize the negative habits as they arise.

You might be asking yourself… if I’m on break then why does any of this matter? However, in my experience as a college student home for my third year of winter break, I’ve grown to understand the feeling of missed time and opportunities well. They lead to anxiety, undue depression and can sometimes make being home just that much harder. What could you accomplish if you invested every one of those meaningless moments sifting through social media into yourself? What could you achieve if you reinvested each moment that you binged watched a television show into spending time with your family, or your career, or your business?

I think that understanding what is important to you is the first step in realizing what habits you might need to make or break to allow you to find the true happiness that is possible for you. So, give the phone a rest, give your mind a rest, and go after what is truly available to you. You don’t need to be productive 99% of your day, but just giving yourself 1% better every day might make all the difference.