Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

by B.J. Fogg

Go to events that gather people, products, and services related to your emerging identity.

Update your social media page. Put a new profile picture up that conveys your emerging identity.

For each habit, find ways to redesign your environment so that each one is easier to do.

Uphill Habits are those that require ongoing attention to maintain but are easy to stop—getting

Downhill Habits are easy to maintain but difficult to stop—hitting

Freefall Habits are those habits like substance abuse that can be extremely difficult to stop unless you have a safety net of professional help.

You have to approach it systematically and find the easiest knot to untangle.

It’s much better to first build your skills and gain mastery over the change process itself.

When you create a host of positive changes, you move closer to the person you want to become.

When it comes to stopping a bad habit, a common mistake is trying to motivate yourself toward an abstraction,

When you see a bunch of specific habits to untangle, don’t stop there. And don’t get overwhelmed. Keep going. Pick one tangle and design it out of your life.

Remove the prompt

Avoid the prompt

Ignore the prompt

Adjust Motivation in Order to Stop a Habit

ADD A DEMOTIVATOR TO STOP A HABIT

Scaling Back the Change

DESIGN FOR SWAPPING A BEHAVIOR

the three criteria for matching yourself with a Golden Behavior. Impact: the behavior is effective Motivation: you want to do the behavior Ability: You can do the behavior

Try the swap in a limited way. See how it goes for three days, then decide what to do next.

When you are dealing with habits of omission or avoidance, you need to get behaviors to happen rather than stopping them.

You will also find people in your life who make bad habits easier to do. In some approaches to behavior change, those people are called enablers. They are not to be underestimated!

PRACTICE CREATING A SWARM OF BEHAVIORS FOR STOPPING A BAD HABIT

Write down at least ten specific habits around the cloud. This will require some imagination.

PRACTICE SWAPPING A HABIT AND CELEBRATING TO MAKE IT STICK

Help people do what they already want to do.

Help people feel successful.

Your first step in troubleshooting is to examine the prompt.

Sometimes the process of changing together unfolds in a straightforward way,

breaking up the homework into smaller tasks.

ten-minute increments—organizing

five-minute breaks to jump on the trampoline

If Rachel pushed back on something, she’d make a deal with her—they’d try it Rachel’s way for five days and Amy’s way for five days and take notes on which worked better.

incorporate heavy doses of celebration into their Homework Habit Recipes. They played around with high fives, silly dances, and sticker charts to find the celebrations that worked best for each win.

write a list of Anchors (routines they did every day

The quality of our life on planet Earth depends on the choices we make every day—choices