Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

by B.J. Fogg

Behaviors are like bicycles. They can look different, but the core mechanisms are the same. Wheels. Brakes. Pedals.

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

Here’s an easy way to differentiate behaviors from aspirations and outcomes: A behavior is something you can do right now or at another specific point in time. You can turn off your phone. You can eat a carrot. You can open a textbook and read five pages. These are actions that you can do at any given moment. In contrast, you can’t achieve an aspiration or outcome at any given moment. You cannot suddenly get better sleep. You cannot lose twelve pounds at dinner tonight. You can only achieve aspirations and outcomes over time if you execute the right specific behaviors.

In my research, I’ve found that adults have many ways to tell themselves, “I did a bad job,” and very few ways of saying, “I did a good job.” We rarely recognize our successes and feel good about what we’ve done.

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 are doing something worthy of celebration This is the most important answer because recognizing that you are doing something worthy of celebration will change so much for you. Your ability to ignore self-criticism and embrace feeling good about your successes will ripple out into your life in positive ways that go far beyond the habits you create and celebrate.

Hope and fear are vectors that push against each other, and the sum of those two vectors is your overall motivation level.

If you can remove the vector of fear, then hope will predominate, and your overall motivation level will be higher, which may move you above the Action Line—and you do the behavior.

However, if there was a time that Sukumar didn’t want to do a lot of push-ups, he didn’t force himself. He did two and felt good about keeping the habit alive. Part of this skill is knowing when to back off and do only the baseline.

Identity shifts are change boosters because they help us cultivate constellations of behavior—not just one or two habits here and there. This is important because most aspirations require more than one type of habit change. It’s a set of new habits that will get you where you want to be—especially in the areas of fitness, sleep, and stress.

And demotivators can push us into self-criticism. If you want to cut down on calories, putting a note on your fridge that says, STOP! YOU’RE OVERWEIGHT would certainly be demotivating, but it’s also demoralizing. We change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad, so make sure your attempts at demotivating behavior don’t morph into guilt trips.