Tiny Habits | BJ Fogg

When our results fall short of our expectations, the inner critic finds an opening and steps on stage. Many of us believe that if we fail to be more productive, lose weight, or exercise regularly then something must be wrong with us. If only we were better people, we wouldn’t have failed. If only we had followed that program to the letter or kept those promises to ourselves, we would have succeeded. We just need to get our act together and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and do better. Right?

Nope. Sorry. Not right.

We are not the problem. Our approach to change is. It’s a design flaw—not a personal flaw. In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things.

• Stop judging yourself.
• Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors.
• Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.

Tiny Habits is your guide to disrupting the old approach and replacing it with an entirely new framework for change.

In my research on habit formation, dating back to 2009, I’ve found that there are only three things we can do that will create lasting change: Have an epiphany, change our environment, or change our habits in tiny ways.

Creating positive habits is the place to start, and creating tiny positive habits is the path to developing much bigger ones. Once you know how Tiny Habits works—and why it works—you can make big one-time changes. You can disrupt unwanted habits. You can work up to bucket-list behaviors like running a marathon.

The essence of Tiny Habits is this: Take a behavior you want, make it tiny, find where it fits naturally in your life, and nurture its growth. If you want to create long-term change, it’s best to start small.

The only consistent, sustainable way to grow big is to start small.

One tiny action, one small bite, might feel insignificant at first, but it allows you to gain the momentum you need to ramp up to bigger challenges and faster progress. The next thing you know, you’ve eaten the whole whale.

Simplicity changes behavior.

You can change your life by changing your behaviors. You know that. But what you may not know is that only three variables drive those behaviors.

The Fogg Behavior Model is the key to unlocking that mystery. It represents the three universal elements of behavior and their relationship to one another. It’s based on principles that show us how these elements work together to drive our every action—from flossing one tooth to running a marathon.

A behavior happens when the three elements of MAP—Motivation, Ability, and Prompt—come together at the same moment. Motivation is your desire to do the behavior. Ability is your capacity to do the behavior. And Prompt is your cue to do the behavior.

1. The more motivated you are to do a behavior, the more likely you are to do the behavior

2. The harder a behavior is to do, the less likely you are to do it

The easier a behavior is to do, the more likely the behavior will become habit.

3. Motivation and ability work together like teammates

The amount you have of one affects the amount you need of the other.

4. No behavior happens without a prompt

Motivation Is Unreliable

Motivation is like a party-animal friend. Great for a night out, but not someone you would rely on to pick you up from the airport. You must understand its role and its limitations, then pick behaviors that don’t rely on such a fickle friend.

PAC Person. You’ll see him pop up again and again—it turns out that Person, Action, and Context are fundamental for understanding human behavior.

Motivation can come from one of three places. First, motivation can come from inside a person: You already want to do the behavior. For example, most of us are motivated to look attractive. This is built into us as humans. Motivation can also come from a benefit or punishment associated with a behavior. Let’s talk about taxes. Most of us don’t wake up in the morning wanting to pay taxes, but there are punishments for not paying. That motivates us. Finally, motivation can come from our context (our current environment). Suppose you are at an art auction that supports a charity. If the cause is worthy and if people are drinking and if the auctioneer creates a lot of energy, all of this—the context (which is carefully designed)—will motivate you to pay a lot for a simple painting.

The more vividly you can picture what you want, the better. You usually have to know where you’re going in order to get there.

In Behavior Design we have a name for the best matches: Golden Behaviors. A Golden Behavior has three criteria.

1. The behavior is effective in realizing your aspiration (impact)
2. You want to do the behavior (motivation)
3. You can do the behavior (ability)

We should be dreamy about aspirations but not about the behaviors that will get us there. Behaviors are grounded. Concrete. They are the handholds and footholds that get you up the rock face. Your path to the top is your own, and you choose your behaviors according to the particular rock you are climbing.

The next step in the process of Behavior Design is to make things as simple as possible.

Ability—Easy Does It

Start Tiny

This is one of the hacks in the Tiny Habits method: Make the behavior so tiny that you don’t need much motivation.

If a behavior is hard, make it easier to do. You’ll see that over time your motivation will vary, but your ability will improve the more you do your new habit. And that increase in ability helps your habit grow.

Making your behavior easy to do not only helps it take root so it can grow big, but it also helps you hang on to it as a habit when the going gets tough. Think of it this way: You can keep many tiny plants alive by giving them a few drops of water a day. It’s the same with habits. There are still days when my motivation is unusually low for flossing. On those days, I floss only one tooth. The key is that I never feel bad about it because I’ve done my habit—I know one tooth is enough to keep the habit alive. Most days I do all of them, so I’m not about to sweat a day or two here and there. Stuff happens.

Keeping the habit alive means keeping it rooted in your routine no matter how tiny it is.

When it comes to habit formation, simplicity wins.

Everything big started small.

Taking the first step, no matter how small, can generate a sense of momentum that our brains love. Completing tasks gives us a boost of confidence, and this increases our motivation to do the entire behavior.

Prompts are the invisible drivers of our lives.

No behavior happens without a prompt.

Prompts are black-and-white. You either notice the prompt or you don’t. And if you don’t notice the prompt, or if the prompt happens at the wrong time, then the behavior won’t happen.

For some habits, it’s all about finding out where a new habit fits into your day.

Emotions Create Habits

What happens in your brain when you experience positive reinforcement isn’t magic—it’s neurochemical. Good feelings spur the production of a neurotransmitter (a chemical messenger in the brain) called dopamine that controls the brain’s “reward system” and helps us remember what behavior led to feeling good so we will do it again. With the help of dopamine, the brain encodes the cause-and-effect relationship, and this creates expectations for the future.

You can hack into this reward system by creating an event in your brain that neuroscientists call a “reward prediction error.” Here’s how it works: Your brain is constantly assessing and reassessing the experiences, sights, sounds, smells, and movements in the world around you. Based on previous experiences, your brain has formed predictions about what you will experience in any given situation. Your brain predicts what will happen when you drop your phone on concrete (oh no!), and your brain predicts the taste of clam chowder at your favorite restaurant (yum). When an experience deviates from the pattern your brain expects (oh, my phone didn’t break after all), that’s when you get a “reward prediction error,” and neurons in your brain adjust the release of dopamine in order to encode an updated expectation.

When I teach people about human behavior, I boil it down to three words to make the point crystal clear: Emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Not fairy dust. Emotions.

Celebration is the best way to create a positive feeling that wires in your new habits. It’s free, fast, and available to people of every color, shape, size, income, and personality. In addition, celebration teaches us how to be nice to ourselves—a skill that pays out the biggest dividends of all.

You need to celebrate immediately after the behavior. Immediacy is one piece of what informs the speed of your habit formation. The other piece is the intensity of the emotion you feel when you celebrate. This is a one-two punch: you’ve got to celebrate right after the behavior (immediacy), and you need your celebration to feel real (intensity).

Growing Your Habits from Tiny to Transformative

How long does it take for habits to grow to their full expression? There is no universal answer. Any advice you hear about a habit taking twenty-one or sixty days to fully form is not entirely accurate. There is no magic number of days. Why? Because the formation time of a habit depends on three things.

1. The person doing the habit
2. The habit itself (the action)
3. The context

In fact, it’s the interaction between these elements that determines how difficult (or easy) it is to form the habit. That’s why no one can say for sure that habit X takes Y number of days to become fully realized.