Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

One of the author’s students, Mike Krieger, joined Kevin Systrom to analyze the failure of a recent app, Burbn, a location sharer. They found that one portion of the app, sharing photos, was heavily used, so they developed a photo-sharing app, which nailed down the motivation problem. They made the app simple to use—three clicks and you’re done—which solved the feasibility issue. The result was Instagram, which its competitor Facebook bought for $1 billion; Instagram soon was worth 100 times more.

Going big is dramatic, but it often costs too much, and the process usually lets people down. Going small by making incremental changes costs little, can be done continuously, and often arrives at a big goal more quickly.

Sarika is bipolar. She hates the medications for it, but the alternatives—therapy, meditation, and exercise—require a routine that she won’t follow. On days of inspiration, she’d be able to do habitual things, but otherwise she didn’t follow up. Using Tiny Habits, Sarika learned to do a few repetitions of an exercise, less than a minute of meditation, and so forth. These habits grew into full-fledged daily activities. Any setbacks, like an injury, no longer spin her into a downward spiral, since she knows she’ll soon recover her habits, a bit at a time.

The fourth step in Behavior Design is to “Start Tiny.” Starting a new exercise habit by doing 20 pushups a day is hard to do and not motivating, whereas doing just two pushups against a wall, while not very inspiring, is super easy to do. This makes it much more likely to achieve: “Make the behavior so tiny that you don’t need much motivation” (77). Easy, small habits grow into easy, big habits; 20 pushups will quickly become no problem.

The author first tried this method on himself when he chose to floss one tooth per day. He gave himself extra credit if he flossed more than one tooth. After two weeks, he was flossing all his teeth twice a day, a habit that he’s maintained ever since.

If something is hard to do, it’s because of one (or more) of five factors, linked together in an Ability Chain: time, money, physical effort, mental effort, and current routines. For example, doing seven minutes of exercise takes little time and no money, but at first it requires daunting physical effort. With flossing, the author got stuck on physical effort because his teeth are close together, and floss is hard to insert and tends to shred. He solved this by testing several types of floss until he found the one that worked for him.

A major secret to successful Tiny Habits is making the behavior easier to do. The first technique is to increase skills by learning from a coach, classes, the Internet, and so on, how to do a behavior, and by practicing until a behavior becomes easy. The second approach is to obtain tools and resources, “from getting a better set of kitchen knives to finding more comfortable walking shoes” (84). The third approach is to make a behavior “radically tiny,” which automatically makes it easier.

If a person wants to walk three miles a day, the radically tiny habit would be simply to put on walking shoes. (Walking around the block is good but not required.) Sarika learned to cook breakfast by turning on the stove burner. Each of these is a “Starter Step,” a preparatory action. Another way to make a habit tiny is “scaling back,” or starting with one tiny motion within the complete habit. To drink more water, a starter step is to put a water bottle in a purse, and a scaled-back step is to take one sip of water.

To create a simple Tiny Habit, first analyze what makes the habit hard to do. Use the Ability Chain to isolate the difficulty. Next, design a way to make it easier, either by improving skills, acquiring tools, or reducing the size of the habit.

On a day with interruptions or low motivation, stick to the original Tiny Habit—flossing just one tooth, or doing two pushups—to keep it active. The larger habit will return shortly.

Tiny Habits also works on intimidating actions, like calling for a surgery appointment: Just deciding to write down the phone number gets the process started.

All behaviors begin with a prompt. The light turns green; you go. An email alert pops up; you check your mail. Raindrops strike your arm; you open an umbrella. What’s also true is that “No behavior happens without a prompt,” which leads to the fifth step in Behavior design: “Find a Good Prompt” (97-98).

Amy’s prompt was simple: When she dropped her kid off at school and the car door slammed, she’d write down her most important task for the day on a Post-it. This soon started a cascade of actions: Back home, she’d place the note prominently at her desk; soon, she was getting more and more done, and her new business began to grow: “What had started with one Post-it turned into a productivity avalanche” (100).

A good prompt needs to be designed so it will work well. A snooze button is a prompt, but not a useful one; one more Post-it on a board full of them won’t work, either. Another poor choice is relying on a Person Prompt—usually, yourself—to remind you to do something. A better approach is a Context cue, or something in the environment that goads an action. To-do lists don’t prompt naturally, but calendar alerts, properly set up, are good Context cues. Too many Context alerts, though, can overload you.

Action Prompts, things you’re already doing—like brushing your teeth as a reminder to floss, or using morning coffee prep to remind you to do a stretch—are among the strongest prompts. Every day is filled with natural prompts: flushing the toilet, hanging up a coat, dropping off a kid at school. These prompts are solidly in place and stable; they’re called Anchors. The secret is to find the Action Prompt that should come just before the new habit.

Mornings tend to have more routines, but any regular routine is a good place to find an Anchor. It’s best to pick a precise prompt: “A fuzzy Anchor (‘after dinner’ or ‘whenever I feel stress’) doesn’t work” (112). The Anchor should happen in the same place as the intended new habit; thus, something that happens in the kitchen is a potential Anchor for cleaning the kitchen table. Anchors also should happen as often as the new habit; if the habit should happen several times a day, search for an Anchor that happens several times a day. (The author used peeing as an Anchor for doing pushups multiple times per day.) It’s also important to match the Anchor’s theme to the new habit, as when Sarika used watering her plants to remind her to drink an extra glass of water.

Sometimes an Anchor won’t elicit the best habit-forming response; by experimenting with different combinations of Anchor and Habit, you’ll improve the results. To refine a fuzzy Anchor, look to the last thing in the Anchor, and use that as the prompt. For example, a fuzzy Anchor is “after breakfast,” while a more focused Anchor is when you put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher.

It’s also useful to look for Anchors, then think of habits that can be connected to them. People always have short pockets of empty time, such as waiting at a red light or standing in line at the store, where they can add a new habit. These might be times for a moment of feeling grateful about something, a quick stretch, or a deep and relaxing breath.

Pearl Habits take irritating prompts and turn them to good use. The author had trouble sleeping because the bedroom A/C control kept clicking whenever the A/C went on or off. He used the clicks as prompts to relax his face and neck. The clicks now make him relax and feel happier.

Struggling through a difficult divorce that kept her in contact with her ex, Amy decided to use his frequent, angry insults as the Anchors for a new habit, to think up something nice to do for herself. This helped minimize her frustration, turned a bad encounter into a prompt for self-nurturing, and improved her mood. The change even encouraged her husband to cease being confrontational.

People have more ways to criticize than congratulate themselves. The Tiny Habits method adds good feelings that generate positive emotions. This is done through the technique of celebration.

During some of his worst days—business falling apart, a death in the family—the author celebrated his tiny wins, like brushing one tooth. He’d look in the mirror, smile, and say, “Victory!” Somehow, that made him feel better. He found that adding little victory moments to his other Tiny Habits made them lock in better. This also proved true for his Tiny Habits students. His research showed that “you can hack your brain to create a habit by celebrating and self-reinforcing” (134).

The sixth step in forming habits, then, is to “Celebrate Successes.” Completion of a behavior triggers a neurotransmitter in the brain, dopamine, which enhances feelings of reward and pleasant memories of the outcome, which reinforce the behavior. Tiny Habits augments this process.

It’s not the repetition itself that creates or removes a habit; it’s the feelings connected to the behavior. When first forming a habit, a person decides to do the behavior, which causes the behavior, which causes feedback, and if that feedback is positive, the behavior starts to get repeated until it becomes a fully formed, automatic habit. A behavior that gets a strongly positive result will form quickly, with no need for lots of repetition.

Rewards are different from, and much more powerful than, incentives. An incentive—a promise of a reward later for doing something now—can be useful, but it doesn’t wire in a habit nearly as well as an immediate reward.

Once a habit is fully formed, celebration becomes optional. Overall, though, celebrating small wins is a form of “habit fertilizer” that encourages building more new habits.

One of the most powerful rewards is the feeling of success. This leads to “Fogg Maxim #2: Help people feel successful” (141).

Celebration has two parts: It should happen immediately, and it should have intensity. Each person can find appropriate ways to express success; if a fist pump and “Awesome!” feel lame, another method—perhaps a smile and/or a “quiet affirmation”—might work better.

There’s no simple word in English for the feeling of success that accompanies the completion of a useful task. The author describes it with the word “Shine.” Of all the skills needed to create habits, Shine is the most important. A good way to discover your own way of feeling Shine is to imagine scenarios where you feel success, such as getting hired or watching your favorite sports team win a big game, make note of your excitement, and use it as your daily habit-building routine. (The Appendix contains a list of 100 ways to “feel Shine.”)

Celebrating something as small as a Tiny Habit might seem inappropriate, but the system works. The mind responds to the good feelings by baking in the habit. Celebrations can feel awkward at first, but doing them is a skill that improves with practice and, in time, feels normal.

One way to remember and perform a Tiny Habit is to rehearse it. If, for example, the remote must be placed in a specific spot when the TV is switched off, a Habiteer can practice by shutting off the TV, placing the remote correctly, and celebrating. This rehearsal should be done seven to ten times until the user is comfortable with it and its celebration.

Celebrations ideally take place three times for each habit. The first is when the Habiteer thinks to do the behavior; by celebrating, she rewards herself for remembering to do the habit. The second is to celebrate while doing the behavior, perhaps by imagining the benefits of doing the act. The third is to celebrate when you’ve successfully completed the behavior.

Celebrations aren’t as necessary when the habit is firmly in place, but they’re needed whenever the habit has been interrupted awhile by outside events, or when the Habiteer increases the amount of the behavior.

Using celebrations needn’t be limited to Tiny Habits. They can be used on the fly, whenever you do something that improves your life or makes you feel proud or successful. Celebrating will increase the likelihood that you’ll do the behavior again, and it reinforces doing more such good things in the future.