I spent a lot of time in my childhood and early-teens, playing and watching tenis. I was always fascinated by the rituals tenis players do during matches, either before a game or during and after points. Of course I would find myself imitating my favorite players and copying their little routines, either fixing my racket strings in between points or hitting my shoe with the side of the racket before a serve. I did not exactly know why I would do such things, but I knew that it did something in my brain and it allowed me to be more focused during a match.

Flashforward to recent years where I read "The Power of Full Engagement" by Loehr and Schwartz, where they explain why tenis players do those weird routines that almost look like nervous tics.

From the book about the time between points routines:

In the sixteen to twenty seconds between points in a match, the heart rates of top competitors dropped as much as twenty beats per minute. By building highly efficient and focused recovery routines, these players had found a way to derive extraordinary energy renewal in a very short period of time.

So those habits have a very strong purpose of resetting their bodies for the next point and also their minds, because they also use those routines, to quickly assess what they did wrong in the previous point, forget about it and go to the next point. All of that in a fraction of time.

Since reading "The Power of Full Engagement" I became obsessed about habits and routines, reading a bunch of books about the subject in the past 5 years. And hands down, "Atomic Habits" by James Clear is the best I have encountered, not only about habits but about human behavior and the inner-workings of the human mind. As opposed of other books, this one does not spend a lot of time talking about experiments and researches, it goes straight to the point. It tells you this is how the minds works when it comes to good and bad habits and this is what you could do about it. And I certainly appreciate that from a book in the self-help/productiviy genre.

But how about "The Power of Habit" by Chales Duhigg? You may ask. That book came up with the Habit-Loop concept of Cue -> Craving -> Response -> Reward, and it is mostly theoretical. James Clear took that concept and expand it to present a practical framework for developing new habits and avoiding bad ones.

• Cue: for good habits make it obvious, make it invisible for bad.
• Craving: for good habits make it attractive, make it unattractive for bad.
• Response: for good habits make it easy, make it difficult for bad.
• Reward: for good habits make it satisfying, make it unsatisfying for bad.

That simple framework covers every possible aspect you could think about habits and the book is full of easy strategies to follow. Overall it is a very easy read, with short chapters and without any fluff. I just finished reading this book for the second time and it will probably not be the last.