Badass Habits summary

Introduction

Badass Habits by Jensen Serow Change your habits, change who you are. Do you ever feel stuck in a rut? We all have habits we would rather leave behind, from chronic lateness to impulse shopping. Breaking old patterns and replacing them with better ones is not always as easy as it seems.

But do not despair. This summary will help you chart a new way forward. You will learn how unconscious biases, fears, and desires can lock you into routines. Then, you will get simple, straightforward advice.

Learn how to disrupt entrenched habits and cultivate a new, more positive groove.

Habits and Personal Identity

Habits and Personal Identity. At 30 years old, she realized she was in a toxic relationship. It was not with a parent or a partner, but with sugar. Every time Alice indulged in sweets, she would get terrible breakouts.

She would worry about weight gain and generally just feel awful. Something had to change. So, she stopped buying and binging on snacks. She sought advice from dieticians and even watched documentaries demonizing sucrose.

These steps helped, but she always felt one bad day away from slipping back into old ways. In the end, Alice had to change not just her actions, but her whole identity. She had to become a person who simply did not eat sugar. The key message here is to change your habits, change who you are.

To put it simply, a habit is a routine. It is an action or behavior you engage in over and over again. Essentially, it is what you do when running on autopilot. Habits can be positive patterns.

For example, you might always put on your seatbelt when driving. Alternatively, they can be destructive, like constantly misplacing keys, jewelry, or other valuables. Habits work by connecting a trigger to a response. They then connect that response to a reward.

Consider a habit like daily exercise. The trigger could be seeing your gym on the way home from work. The response would then be stopping in for 40 minutes of cardio. The reward is the rush of endorphins and a feeling of accomplishment.

Importantly, the more often you follow this sequence, the more automatic and ingrained it becomes. Of course, you probably are not aware that the sequence is taking place. If you are like most people, many of your habits are completely unconscious. So, the first step in making any change to your routines is to identify them.

To do that, reflect on your actions. Reflect on your thoughts and feelings associated with them. For someone like Alice, this meant looking at when sugar binges happen. Did stress trigger them?

What reward did they offer? Once you become aware of the sequences behind your habits, you can consciously alter them. This requires redefining your identity to fit the new habits you want. So, Alice needed to stop seeing herself as a sugar-addicted ball of stress.

Instead, she had to cultivate an identity as a healthy, happy eater. Once you truly see yourself as a different person, your unconscious sequences will fall in line more easily. We will look at one way to establish an identity in the next chapter.