Life Kit - A proven method to make a habit stick

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

BJ Fogg, a behavior scientist at Stanford University and author of Tiny Habits, says you’ve got to start small if you want your habit to stick. He shares his research including the important role of positive emotion in habit formation and why you can work on several habits at once.Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekitSign up for our newsletter here.Have an episode idea or feedback you want to share? Email us at [e-mail] the show and listen to it sponsor-free by signing up for Life Kit+ at plus.npr.org/lifekitLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Mariel. Before we start the show, let's play a little game. What helps you live longer, improves symptoms of depression and anxiety, cuts your risk of chronic illnesses, bolsters your immune system, strengthens your bones, and reduces chronic pain? Strength training. And that's not even a full list of all the benefits. To help you get started building muscle, we created a newsletter series. No experience necessary to get going. Sign up at npr.org slash stronger.

or find the link in the episode description. This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Mariel Segarra. Hey, it's Mariel. I want you to think about your typical day. From the moment you wake up, what actions do you take that are basically automatic? Probably turn off your alarm.

And if you're like me, start scrolling on your phone before your eyes are fully open. Don't worry, I'm trying to change that. Then you brush your teeth, drink some water maybe. You have a collection of habits. good and bad, and that's just the first few minutes of the day. The good news is, even though habits are automatic, we can change them. Start new ones, for instance.

BJ Fogg is a behavior scientist at Stanford University, and he is starting the habit of dancing in the dark every morning when he wakes up. After I put my feet on the floor in the morning, I say, it's going to be a great day, and then I go out and I drink a big glass of water. And then once I have that big glass of water, that's what prompts me to turn on the music and do this dancing that I do. BJ founded Stanford's Behavior Design Lab, and he studies habit formation. He came up with a research-backed approach to starting new habits called the Tiny Habits Method. One aspect of it is that you set the bar really low.

And you do the easiest version of the habit every day no matter what. You know, turn on some music, dance for 20 or 30 seconds. say, great, I didn't move on. But if you want to do more, you do more. And I can't think of a single time when I've stopped dancing after 20 or 30 seconds. On this episode of Life Kit, how to start a habit. I talk to BJ about what works and how to do this step by step. We also talk about breaking habits, which he says is different and likely requires a different approach, though we don't know everything there is to know about it yet. He does have some ideas, though. Just a thought here. If you made a big New Year's resolution like eat healthier or get fit or make more friends. And you're not

sure where to start with that. Breaking it down into tiny habits could really help. Let's have a definition to start. How do you define a habit? A habit is something you do quite automatically without really thinking or deliberating. And the habit can be daily. The habit could be weekly. that habit could be once a year. So frequency, in my view, doesn't define habit. It's how automatically you do it, how much you do it without deciding, without choosing, without thinking. How can you decide that you want to start a particular habit? Yeah, the best place to start is staying tuned to what do I want in my life? Do I want more productivity? Do I want to sleep better? Do I want to have more flexibility and mobility? and then designing habits for the things you actually want,

not the things you feel like you should do. Well, tell me about the tiny habits method. Can you break it down for me? Yeah, the tiny habits method is based on a model that I came up with in 2007. I called it the behavior model. And a habit is a type of behavior. A behavior happens when three things come together at the same moment.

There's motivation to do the behavior. There's ability to do the behavior. And then there's a prompt. There's something that reminds or cues the behavior. When those three things come together, the behavior happens. And so as I was looking at my model, what I saw was if a behavior is really, really easy to do, then I don't have to have high levels of motivation. But if a behavior is hard to do, yes, I have to have high levels of motivation.

So what I saw was I pick a habit that's really easy to do, like floss one tooth. then my motivation can be high or low and I'll still do it because it's so easy and notice flossing it's not floss all your teeth it's floss one tooth that's the very low bar and when you want to do more you can but if you only floss one tooth and move on

you count it as a success the next part of the method is to design it into your schedule into your existing routine and what you're looking for is what does it come after naturally. So you're not using post-its or alarms or just sheer memory to do the new habit. You're using an existing routine you already have. And I call that anchoring. Where for flossing,

what would be the existing routine to remind you to floss? Well, it's brushing. So then you have this phrase that in tiny habits we call a recipe. After I brush, I will floss. lost one tooth. And if it comes to something like doing squats, it could be after I start the coffee maker, I will do two squats. So that's step two. Step three in the tiny habits method is to self-reinforce. And I've called that celebration. Not everybody likes that word, but the idea is you allow yourself or you cause yourself to feel successful when you do the new habit. Because it's that emotion, it's that feeling of success that causes the habit to become more automatic. So if I'm flossing one tooth, I can look in the mirror and smile and go, way to go, BJ, right?

There's many, many ways to help yourself feel successful. But it's not repetition that creates habits. It's emotion. And the stronger you can feel a positive emotion as you do the habit, the faster the habit wires into your life. Do you keep celebrating forever? What a great question. Self-reinforcement is something you do to help the behavior become automatic. And then once it's wired in, then you don't have to self-reinforce. Takeaway one.

A habit is something you do automatically without really thinking about it, like brushing your teeth. According to BJ's research, if a task is easy, people tend to have higher. motivation to do it. So he says, if you want to start a habit, keep the bar low. Say at a minimum, I want to floss one tooth today, or do one push up or walk one block. You can do more, but you don't have to. He also recommends that you design the habit into your existing schedule and pair it with something else that can prompt you. Like after I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth. After I make coffee, I will do two calf raises. And then celebrate your win. And you said that it's not repetition that creates a habit, but emotion.

Does that mean just positive emotion? Like what other sort of emotions trigger habits? The way I see it is positive emotions, yes, especially the feeling of success. But also the alleviation of if you go from feeling negative to less negative, that can also wear in habits. So let's say you are feeling negative. feeling really anxious, and then you do something and you feel less anxious right away, whatever you did is going to start becoming a habit. And for some people, that might be smoking or going on social media.

And that's why those things wear in his habits, because they go from a negative state to something that is less negative or maybe even positive. So the way I see it in general, it is a net gain in positive emotions. That actually brings me to my next question, which is we reached out to you asking what it takes to break a bad habit. But you said that that's hard to answer. Why is that? Yeah. Creating habits and undoing habits are different processes. I don't claim that much expertise around bad habits. It's a much more complicated landscape. So there's three factors. This kind of person doing this kind of action and this kind of of context. So somebody who smokes occasionally after a party with friends is different than somebody who smokes every morning on their way to work. Yes, the behavior sounds similar smoking, but it's a

different context. And one of those habits is going to be much easier to resolve than the other one. Now, we know that a behavior happens when motivation, ability, and prompt come together at the same time and if you get rid of any one of those three things the behavior will stop if you can get rid of motivation then you won't do the behavior of habit if you can get rid of ability or make it super hard to do or impossible then the habit stops if you can remove the prompt it stops and yes it can be done there are ways to untangle unwanted behaviors but i just don't want to trivialize how hard that might be in some cases. And in other cases, it might be easier than people think. I remember I used to really love eating apricots, dried apricots. But then I bit into one

and there was like a little larva in there. And I was like, oh my God. And then like it happened again. And then I learned that this is a thing, that there are often larvae in apricots and in the dried ones and that habit changed real fast. I didn't have to try. I was like, I don't eat them anymore. Like that's it. I don't want to bite into a larvae, even if it's dead. And so I got the ick about apricots. Sometimes this happens unintentionally, but I think if it's something that you're like a habit that you're fine to lose or that's not good for you anyway, like I'm sort of like, roll with it, you know? What a great example. And I've discussed. is a very fundamental and powerful emotion in humans.

And so that's what that example is tapping into. The way I think about it from a behavior model perspective, there's motivation that's pushing you up over the threshold to eat apricots. And then there might be demotivators that saying, I really probably shouldn't eat this apricot. Once you bid in and were disgusted, that force pushing it down became much, much stronger. So you've got motivation that's for any habit or behavior,

you have motivation that's pushing you up, something that you hope to achieve through eating apricot or doing other things. And then, especially for habits that people want to stop, you do have demotivators. Like, oh, I really shouldn't be doing this. I'd be healthier if I didn't do this and so on. But there's no magical way to make that vector pushing down stronger.

The other lever you have to pull is ability. can I make this habit harder to do? In my work, I have a model for what makes something easier or hard, and it comes down to five components, how much time it takes, how much money it takes, how much thinking it takes, how much physical effort, and does it map into your routine? So you have five, I guess, subcategories of ability

that if you could make something radically take a lot more time to do, or take a lot more money to do, or you have to use a lot more cognitive effort and so on. That's a way to have some chance of reducing the frequency of the behavior, stopping it entirely. Takeaway two. Breaking a habit is different than starting one. And BJ says that he hasn't come across a validated,

research-backed method for breaking them. But he says it could help to find an expert who specializes in your particular bad habit and in working with people like you in situations like yours. They can help you understand what motivates you to do this thing and what complications might come up as you try to break the habit. BJ also made some general suggestions based on his years of research. We know that behaviors start when we have motivation, ability, and a prompt. So if you want to break or untangle a habit,

you could try to get rid of at least one of these. We'll have more on the last one, How to Remove a Prompt, after the break. One other question I wanted to ask, because you had the three parts of the, motivation, which is what we've been talking about a lot, and then there was the ability. And then there's the prompt. Can you say more about the prompt? What is that? Yeah, the prompt is anything that reminds you or says, do this behavior now. And the prompts can

come from inside you where you just get an urge, like I'm hungry or I'm feeling anxious or, oh yeah, I need to call my mom. The prompt can come from outside you. somebody sends you a text message or a reminder pops up or the prompt can be part of your existing routine and that's the innovation in tiny habits is to use a behavior you already do and have that be a prompt for a new habit that you want we associate starting the coffee maker with doing squats you are designing it into your existing routine you're seeing where does that you're seeing where this habit of dancing fit naturally in my life? Where does this habit of having a protein drink fit naturally in my life? What does it come after? So what would removing a prompt look like?

In my own life, one thing I do is I turn off tons of notifications. So I turn off the digital prompts. And another thing, there was a time when I would drive home from Stanford and I would go by a gas station and that's where I would stop and buy salty snacks because I was done with work and I was on my way home and I would go by the gas station. So I would take a different path on my way home so I wasn't prompted by that gas station. I see. So it's like you still have the ability to do it but it's not in your face. Yeah. Takeaway three. Prompts are like little reminders in your environment or in your body. They cue you to do something. So if you want to untangle a habit, you could hide the prompt. Don't keep candy out in a bowl on the counter. Mute or unfollow your

ex on social media. Change your ringtone. Move your bed. The change you make is going to depend on what the habit is and what prompts it. Okay, so going back to this idea of starting a habit, how many habits do you think you can be trying to start at a time? Well, certainly. more than one. That's one of the false things that people here over and over that only do one habit at a time. I have people work on three habits at a time. And that surprises people. But if they're tiny enough, and if you actually want to do those habits, you don't have to limit yourself to one at a time if you do it in this way where you make it really tight. First of all, you want to do the habit. You make it really easy. You set the bar low and you design it into your existing routine. And are these habits related? They can be. I think it would be helpful if you had a domain like you want more flexibility, more mobility. So within that domain, you created multiple habits within that domain.

I do think that would work better than three different domains. So like similar to how people have a New Year's resolution, you know, I want to eat healthier this year, or be more flexible or get stronger. And I was just talking to Gretchen Rubin about this, how that is too broad in a lot of ways. And you want to be more specific. But it sounds like you could come up with a collection of tiny habits around one of those. Yes.

New Year's resolution is usually the starting point. Usually the resolution is not a specific behavior. It's your aspiration. It's the thing that's motivating you. So you still have some work to do, and I don't mean work in a bad sense. You have exploration to do. You have discovery to do. What specific behaviors will help me achieve this New Year's resolution?

And one thing people can do is just start making a list. If I could wave of magic one and get myself to do any habit that would lead to better nutrition, what would it be? And be as specific as you can. Imagine you're watching yourself in a lot of life. movie doing the behavior and say, oh, BJ opens the fridge and takes out a carrot stick. Great. BJ makes his own salad dressing with olive oil for lunch. Great.

And I call that the movie test. If you can't see it happening in a movie, like eat healthier, then it's not specific enough. But you can see getting a carrot stick out of the fridge. You can see using olive oil and making salad dressing. No question. Do I have to eat the carrot stick or do I just get out of the fridge? Well, that comes back to help yourself do what you already want to do. And if you don't like carrot sticks, take something else. Takeaway four, you can start multiple habits at a time.

It might help if they're all getting you toward the same larger goal, like living healthier or making more friends. If you find yourself with a vague New Year's resolution, you can sharpen it by breaking it down into smaller habits. So when does a tiny habit turn into a mid-sized habit? Like, when do you go from the flossing one tooth to two or three? You can do all your teeth on the first day. You can dance for 30 minutes the first morning.

Let's take push-ups as an example. It's not like you limit yourself to one push-up and the next week you do two and the next week you do three. In fact, I think that would be a very bad approach. What you have is a push-up behavior designed into your schedule and you do the minimum. Maybe you say it's one, and maybe it's a counter push-up

against the bathroom counter. And if you want to do more, you do more. And if you don't, you stop there and you count it as a success. What happens over time is you get more capable of doing those push-ups, so you can do more with the same effort that you had at the very beginning.

And if you feel successful, like if you're feeling stronger and if you're seeing that, then that increases your motivation. and with higher motivation, you can do more. And there's a third factor at play, and I started studying this in about 2014, is there's an identity shift that happens. When you do a behavior within a domain like healthy snacking and you feel successful,

your identity starts shifting to, I'm the kind of person who eats healthy snacks. Or if you do push-ups, your identity can shift. I'm the kind of person who does strength training. And then that has a more global effect. And it doesn't take a lot of time. Well, BJ, thank you so much for this. You're welcome.

Okay, it's time for a recap. Takeaway one, a habit is something you do automatically without really thinking about it. According to BJ's research, if you want to start a habit, keep the bar low, design it into your existing schedule, and pair it with something else that can prompt you. Takeaway two, breaking a habit is different than starting one. and there's no one perfect method that works universally. But we know that behaviors start when we have motivation, ability, and a prompt. So if you want to break or untangle a habit, try getting rid of at least one of these. Takeaway three.

If you're trying to do less of something, hide the prompt. Delete the social media app. Put your phone out of your bedroom. Don't even think about bringing those chips in your house. What you do is going to depend on what the habit is and what prompts it. Takeaway four. you can start multiple habits at a time, though it might help if they're all getting you toward the same larger goal. By the way, BJ has seen people really take to their habits in as

little as five days. And when they do, those people tend to feel a positive identity shift, like, I'm someone who finds time to exercise, or I'm someone who's taking care of my body. Before we go, what's your New Year's resolution this year? Maybe move more, maybe get a little stronger. We have a special newsletter series to help you start your own strength training routine. You can sign up at npr.org slash stronger. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Sylvie Douglas. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan and our digital editor is Malika Garib. Megan Kane is our senior supervising editor and Beth Donovan is our executive producer.

Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marie Schneider, Margaret Serino, and Mika Ellison. Engineering support comes from Stacey Abbott. I'm Mary El Cigara. Thanks for listening.