Building Tiny Habits for Lasting Change

Editor's Note: This is a re-broadcast. It originally aired in February 2020. 

We're a month into the new year now. How are you doing on your resolutions? Have you already fallen off the wagon? Maybe the goal you set for yourself was just too big to successfully tackle. You need to think smaller. Tiny, even.

That's the argument my guest makes. His name is Dr. BJ Fogg, and he's the founder and director of Stanford's Behavior Design Lab, as well as the author of the new book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Today on the show, BJ walks us through the three components that drive our behavior, including the simple yet overlooked relationship between motivation and ability. He then explains how to build habits that feel easier and require lower levels of motivation by picking behaviors that are good matches for you and breaking them down into smaller parts. We also talk about the need to tie your habits to turnkey prompts, the importance of celebrating your successes, no matter how small, and the way tiny habits can lead to bigger changes. We end our conversation with why you should think about the process of getting rid of your bad habits as untangling them rather than breaking them.  

Resources/People/Articles Mentioned in Podcast

• What Makes Your Phone So Addictive and How to Take Back Your Life
• A Proven System for Building and Breaking Habits
• How to Create Habits That Stick
• How to Hack the Habit Loop (and my podcast with Charles Duhigg about habits)
• The Motivation Myth
• How to Stress Proof Your Body and Brain
• Counterintuitive Advice on Making Exercise a Sustainable Habit
• Stick With It -- The Science of Behavior Change
• 7 Tips on Making and Breaking Habits