How to Create Habits With Specificity and Repetition

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Focusing on specificity enhances habit formation. Clearly define what you want to achieve, like specifying a book to read or where to do the reading, as this clarity helps your brain create a stronger connection to the task. Additionally, emotion plays a critical role in solidifying habits. Positive feelings linked to an action can reinforce the habit quickly, making it feel natural or automatic. A strong emotional experience can wire a habit in with just one occurrence, while weaker emotional responses may require repetition to establish the behavior. Thus, while repetition may be necessary for some habits, it is ultimately the emotional impact that solidifies them, emphasizing the importance of feeling successful during the process.

Whether you want to read more books or exercise more regularly, BJ Fogg has good news. “Habits are easier to form than most people think,” he says, “If you do it in the right way.”

As the founder and director of Stanford's Behavior Design Lab, Fogg has devoted much of his career to researching human psychology, motivation, and behavior. According to him, habit formation isn’t a product of simply doing something over and over again. “It's not a function of repetition,” he says, “it's a function of emotion.”

As Fogg discusses with host Matt Abrahams in this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, bringing our behavior in line with our goals is easier than we think — we just have to know the emotional levers to pull.

Connect: