Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

by B.J. Fogg

When it comes to behavior, decision and habit are opposites. Decisions require deliberation, habits do not. You probably decide what to wear to work every morning. But most people don’t decide if they will take their phone when they leave the house. They just take it with them, without deliberating. It’s autopilot.

I’ve created a simple model to explain the difference between decisions and habits. I call this the Spectrum of Automaticity.

On the left-hand side of the spectrum, you have behaviors that are not automatic. They are decisions or deliberate choices. On the right end of the spectrum, you have strong habits—behaviors you do without thinking, like holding a pencil or tying your shoes. The circle in the middle of the spectrum represents a behavior where you deliberate a little bit, so it’s not completely automatic. If you do that behavior in the middle of the spectrum and have an emotional reaction to it—a positive feeling as you’re doing the behavior or immediately after—then that behavior shifts to the right on the spectrum and becomes more automatic.

The overall process of habit formation is exactly the same for “good” habits as it is for those we consider “bad” habits.

You can use many types of self-reinforcement to wire in a habit, but in my research and teaching, I’ve found that the real winner is creating a feeling of success.

Celebration is the best way to create a positive feeling that wires in your new habits.

The definition of a reward in behavior science is an experience directly tied to a behavior that makes that behavior more likely to happen again. The timing of the reward matters. Scientists learned decades ago that rewards need to happen either during the behavior or milliseconds afterward. Dopamine is released and processed by the brain very quickly. That means you’ve got to cue up those good feelings fast to form a habit.

Incentives like a sales bonus or a monthly massage can motivate you, but they don’t rewire your brain. Incentives are way too far in the future to give you that all-important shot of dopamine that encodes the new habit. Doing three squats in the morning and rewarding yourself with a movie that evening won’t work. The squats and the good feelings you get from the movie are too far apart for dopamine to build a bridge between the two.

The neurochemical reaction that you are trying to hack is not only time dependent, it’s also highly individualized. What causes one person ...

A real reward—something that will actually create a habit—is a much narrower target to hit than most people think.

Your brain has a built-in system for encoding new habits, and by celebrating you can hack this system.

When you find a celebration that works for you, and you do it immediately after a new behavior, your brain repatterns to make that behavior more automatic in the future. But once you’ve created a habit, celebration is now optional. You don’t need to keep celebrating the same habit forever. That said, some people keep going with the celebration part of their habits because it feels good and has lots of positive side effects.

Another important thing to remember is that celebration is habit fertilizer. Each individual celebration strengthens the roots of a specific habit, but the accumulation of celebrations over time is what fertilizes the entire habit garden. By cultivating feelings of success and confidence, we make the s...

Fogg Maxim #2: Help people feel successful.

Note that this maxim doesn’t say, “Help people be successful.” It’s about feeling successful instead.

Here’s how to help a habit root quickly and easily in your brain: (1) Perform the behavior sequence (Anchor ⃗ Tiny Behavior) that you want to become a habit and (2) celebrate immediately.

First of all, when I say that you need to celebrate immediately after the behavior, I do mean immediately. 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).

Search for celebrations that feel authentic to you. If you feel awkward or phony when celebrating, your attempts will backfire. Your brain doesn’t want to feel awkward—it wants to feel good.

Your celebration does not have to be something you say out loud or even physically express. The only rule is that it has to be something said or done (internally or externally) that makes you feel good and creates a feeling of success.

I decided to create a new word for this feeling of success. Ready? I call this feeling Shine. You know this feeling already: You feel Shine when you ace an exam. You feel Shine when you give a great presentation and people clap at the end. You feel Shine when you smell something delicious that you cooked for the first time.

How can I wire my habit in fast? and I keep forgetting to do my habit; how can I help myself remember?

To wire in a habit fast or help yourself remember, you need to rehearse the behavior sequence (the Anchor, then the new habit) and immediately celebrate. Repeat this sequence seven to ten times.

When you rehearse your habit, you are training for the very moment you will do the habit in real life, just as you would rehearse for a dance recital or sales pitch.

When it comes to peak performance, rehearsal matters.

When you rehearse in Tiny Habits, you are both training muscle memory and rewiring your brain to remember. And you can drill and wire in a habit quickly if you have an effective celebration.

For the sake of simplicity, I tell people to celebrate immediately after they do a behavior they want to become a habit. But the truth is, you can become a Habit Ninja faster and more reliably by celebrating at three different times: the moment you remember to do the habit, when you’re doing the habit, and immediately after completing the habit. Each of these celebrations has a different effect.

After a habit becomes automatic, you no longer need to celebrate. But, dear reader, you may need a spritz of celebration here and there to keep your habits well hydrated. There are at least two scenarios where celebration can help keep your habit firmly rooted. You haven’t done your habit for a while because you’ve gone on vacation or changed locations. Or life has simply gotten in the way. You are rocking this habit and increasing its intensity. Perhaps your baseline habit was two push-ups, but one day you decide to go for twenty-five push-ups to see what happens.

you change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.

Celebration will one day be ranked alongside mindfulness and gratitude as daily practices that contribute most to our overall happiness and well-being.

Celebrate your tiny successes. This one small shift in your life can have a massive impact even when you feel there is no way up or out of your situation. Celebration can be your lifeline.

When it comes to the process of scaling habits, there are two general categories: habits that grow and habits that multiply.

You’ve heard this before, and my research confirms that it’s true: Success leads to success. But here’s something that may surprise you. The size of the success doesn’t seem to matter very much. When you feel successful at something, even if it’s tiny, your confidence grows quickly, and your motivation increases to do that habit again and perform related behaviors. I call this success momentum. Surprisingly enough, this gets created by the frequency of your successes, not by the size. So with Tiny Habits you are shooting for a bunch of tiny successes done quickly. Not a big one that takes a long time.

One key to designing long-term change is to reduce or remove the demotivators. This allows the natural motivator (often it’s hope) to blossom, which in turn can sustain the new behavior over time.

The first time people do a behavior is a critical moment in terms of habit formation.

I now understand why my Tiny Habits data showed so many breakthroughs. When people feel successful, even with small things, their overall level of motivation goes up dramatically, and with higher levels of motivation, people can do harder behaviors.

The big takeaway: Start where you want to on your path to change. Allow yourself to feel successful. Then trust the process.

Many people believe that forming good habits and transforming your life is a mysterious or magical process. It’s not. As you know by now, there is a system to change. And underlying the system is a set of skills. I’ve found that change is a skill like any other skill. This means you won’t be perfect at the start, but you will get better with practice. And once you have these skills, you can apply them to all sorts of situations.

SKILL SET #1—BEHAVIOR CRAFTING Behavior Crafting is sort of an odd name, but it works. Behavior Crafting skills relate to selecting and adjusting the habits you want in your life.

a new skill that directly helps you go from tiny to transformative. Knowing how many new habits to do at once and when to add more

Understand what motivates you—i.e., know the difference between what you really want and what you think you should do

Here is the next skill that will take you from tiny to transformative. The skill of knowing which new habits will have meaning to you

Here are some guidelines to predict if a new habit will be meaningful to you. The new habit affirms a piece of the identity that you want to cultivate.

The new habit helps you reach an important aspiration.

The new habit has a big impact despite being tiny.

Getting good at this skill helps you match yourself with habits that you can easily create and maintain. But there’s more. As you acquire this skill, you will be more able to identify habits that do not have meaning to you, and you will avoid wasting your time.

By practicing Self-Insight, you can figure out if a new habit is worth pursuing. If it is, great—you’ll have renewed motivation. If it’s not, great—you’ll free up space for other habits that matter more to you. Mastering this skill directs your energy toward more important changes.

As you do a new habit consistently, you will naturally reach for more. At that point, you can learn to find the edge of your comfort and see how it feels to go just a little beyond. Knowing your comfort edge helps you do a bigger version of your habit without feeling pain or frustration, which will weaken the habit.

Don’t pressure yourself to do more than the tiniest version of your habit. If you’re sick, tired, or just not in the mood, scale back to tiny. You can always raise the bar when you want to do more, and—surprisingly—you can lower it to tiny when you need to. Flexibility is part of this skill.

Don’t restrict yourself from going bigger if you want to do more. Let your motivation guide you on how much and how hard.

If you do too much, make sure you celebrate extra hard. Pushing yourself too much to expand a habit can create pain or frustration, which will weaken the habit. If that happens (and it will), you can offs...