In his book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything, psychologist B.J. Fogg tells the story of Sukumar, who struggled with weight loss for years.

After learning about B.J.’s model of behavior change, Sukumar designed two Tiny Habits: doing 2 pushups after brushing his teeth and a 5-second plank. Eventually he “grew” these behaviors to 50 pushups and a 5-minute plank every day.

Habits grow and multiply

Sukumar’s experience is not an exception, B.J. writes. Well-designed habits scale naturally from tiny to transformative. And, this happens without extra doses of motivation or ability.

Here B.J. distinguishes between two kinds of Tiny Habits:

• Growth Habits, such as expanding from 2 pushups daily to 50
• Multiplication Habits, such as doing the Maui habit (After I wake up and put my feet on the floor, I will say: It’s going to be a great day.), which leads to also making your bed.

Trust the process

Growing and multiplying habits does not call for new strategies. These benefits flow naturally from the fundamentals of the Tiny Habits method:

• Start with a clear aspiration or outcome that matters to you.
• Design habits that 1) you want to do, 2) you can do, and 3) will make a positive impact on your life.
• Choose an effective anchor for each new habit (most often, an existing habit).
• Choose whether to ramp up a habit or back off to your baseline behavior — whatever works for today.
• Celebrate every time you do a habit.
• Focus on frequency — having many small and immediate successes rather isolated big ones.

B.J. predicts that success in habit change will gradually shift your identity positive ways. You turn into the kind of person who actually “walks the talk” by aligning your behaviors with your values. This is deeply satisfying, and it builds momentum for creating more new habits.

You can do simple things to assist this process:

• Socialize with people who share your aspirations.
• Find products and services that support your habit changes.
• Share your experiences with habit change on social media.
• Get coaching in habit change.
• Coach other people in habit change.

Lighten up

Habit change is like learning to cook. View each habit that you design as a recipe. Tinker with the ingredients (anchor, behavior, celebration) to get your desired results.

I like this analogy. It underscores the value of staying open, curious, flexible. View habit changes as experiments, and troubleshoot until you find behaviors that “stick.”

Above all, says B.J., have fun. There is no failure on this path — only feedback. Play with the possibilities until you discover what works.

After decades of failed attempts at habit change, I was thrilled to read these words from Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg:

The first thing to remember is this: If you’ve followed some misguided advice on breaking habits and failed, I’m here to say it’s not your fault.

The second thing to remember is that you can design for the change you want in a smarter, better way.

As B.J. explains in Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything, the better way starts with language.

Don’t talk about breaking a habit, which implies that you can drop it after one forceful intervention. Instead, talk about untangling the habit.

I like B.J.’s metaphor of bad habits as knots — clusters of self-defeating behaviors. For example, eating too much junk food can include many behaviors such as:

• Eating fries with dinner
• Having pizza for lunch
• Ordering a bread basket when you go to a restaurant

This kind of analysis sets you up for success. Instead of trying to change a bunch of behaviors at all once, you can untie one knot (habit) at a time.

Going beyond tips and tricks

B.J. groups habits into three categories:

• Uphill habits are challenging to maintain and easy to stop (e.g., example, making the bed).
• Downhill habits are easy to maintain and challenging to stop (e.g., bingeing on Netflix).
• Freefall habits such as addiction are hard to stop unless you get professional help.

In Tiny Habits, B.J. focuses on untangling downhill habits with his Behavior Change Masterplan. It has three phases:

1. Create new positive habits
2. Stop specific habits
3. Swap in a new habit to replace a current one

The Masterplan is an algorithm, not a random collection of “tips” or “life hacks.” The order of these phases matters.

Many people skip directly to phase three, which is the hardest to implement. You’re more likely to succeed by starting with phases one and two.

Phase 1: Create positive new habits

Instead of stopping the habits you don’t want, begin by starting habits that you do want. This calls for the basic skills of behavior change:

• Choosing new behaviors that align with your aspirations and desired outcomes
• Making those new behaviors tiny
• Anchoring each new behavior and celebrating every time you do it

This is an indirect approach to breaking habits, but it makes sense. Starting with small behavior changes sets you up for success.

In addition, “flooding” your life with new behaviors reduces space for habits that you want to drop. Negative habits might simply fall away as they become incompatible with new ones.

Success at habit change also shifts your identity: You start seeing yourself as a person who can design behavior changes and carry them out.

Phase 2: Stop specific habits

If phase 1 does not yield the results you want, then move on to phase 2. This, says B.J., is “when you stare that tangled knot in the face and design your strategy.”

Avoid the common mistake of motivating toward abstractions such as stop stressing out at work and stop being so sedentary. These general habits are too big to untangle in a single attempt. Again, it’s better to untie one knot at a time.

Return to the example of eating too much too much junk food. This general habit involves a cluster of specific habits such as:

• Buying breakfast at the gas station
• Adding sugar to coffee
• Eating a donut during a break from work

Once you target a specific habit to stop, do the following.

First, remove, avoid, or ignore the prompt. As they say in Twelve Step groups, avoid the “people, places, and things” that trigger you. Don’t go to parties with people who repeatedly offer you drinks with alcohol. Avoid watching television news that upsets you. Turn off social media notifications on your phone.

Ignoring a prompt is problematic because it relies on willpower, which can be quickly depleted. If you do succeed, however, be sure to celebrate immediately and powerfully.

Next, reduce ability. Make an unwanted habit harder to do by Increasing the time, money, or effort required. For example:

• Toss junk food from your refrigerator (making mindless snacking harder to do).
• Remove comfy chairs from your office (making sitting all day at work harder to do).
• Choose complicated passwords for your social media accounts (and do not store them in a password manager).

You can also set up an important routine that disrupts the habit. I like to write early in the day, before breakfast. So, I avoid night time habits — such as going to bed late — that interfere with this morning habit.

Finally, reduce motivation. This is the hardest element to change, so save it for last. The goal is to make a habit less appealing.

For example, adjust the settings on your phone so that the screen only shows grayscale. Making the interface less attractive might reduce your motivation to reach for the phone so often.

B.J. does not recommend de-motivators, such as posting on Facebook that you will stop eating dessert. Any failure to keep such a promise provokes guilt. And, as B.J. says, “we change habits by feeling good, not by feeling bad.”

A couple of other points for phase 2:

• Start with the easiest habit. You might uncover many specific habits that you want to stop, which can be discouraging. Success with dropping a simpler habit gives you confidence to tackle harder ones.
• Considering scaling back habits that are especially hard to stop. For example, check social media only once per day instead of multiple times.

Phase 3: Swap a new habit for the old one

Here you design a new behavior to take place at the prompt for an existing behavior. This is the most challenging phase, says B.J. Do it only after you’ve experimented with phases 1 and 2.

All the skills that apply to forming new habits apply here:

• Create a Swarm of Behaviors and define your Golden Behaviors.
• Make each Golden Behavior truly tiny.
• Anchor each behavior do lots of celebration.

P.S. Habits for stopping habits

In the appendix to his book, B.J. lists “Tiny Habits for Stopping Habits.” I’m not sure how (or if) these fit into the above phases, but some examples are:

• After I put my belongings in the car, I will put my phone in the trunk.
• After I get ready for bed, I will plug my phone in a different room to charge overnight in order to stop scrolling Facebook in bed.
• After I leave the house for work, I will drive a route to work that avoids fast food restaurants.
• After I finish dinner, I will immediately brush my teeth in order to stop my snacking in the evening.
• After I finish a glass of wine, I will put dish soap in the glass.

According to Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg, the most important skill in behavior change is celebrating success.

In fact, he singles out celebration as the main takeaway from Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything.

“People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad,” B.J. writes. Celebrate every time you do a habit that you’ve designed — no matter how small.

Celebration changes shifts our mindset. This is not “positive thinking.” It is simply noticing what works.

Many of us find it easy to beat ourselves up about failed behavior change. Designing Tiny Habits and celebrating them undercuts our collective negativity bias.

Ways to celebrate

What you would do if:

• You received an email telling you that you got your dream job?
• Your favorite team won a championship in the last seconds of a game?
• You threw a piece of paper into the recycling bin and it landed perfectly?

Your answers to these questions reveal your personal celebration preferences. Experiment with a variety of methods until you discover what works.

In Tiny Habits, B.J. gives many examples of celebration, such as:

• Say, “Yes!” while you do a fist pump.
• Do a subtle head nod.
• Smile big.
• Do a double thumbs-up.
• Think of your favorite teacher saying, “You did a great job!”
• Raise your arms and say, “Victory!”

Include at least one power celebration — a potent method to use when you want to wire in a new habit immediately.

Feel like you’re faking it?

The trick is finding ways to celebrate that feel authentic for you.

If you ever feel that you’re faking celebration, keep the following points in mind:

• It really is a big deal to design a new habit and actually do it — no matter how small the behavior.
• Remember how your habits connect to your core aspirations, such as being more happy, productive, or loving.
• Positive emotion helps you develop stable habits.
• Celebration is a skill that improves with practice.

When to celebrate

Make your celebration immediate and intense, doing it:

• When you remember to do the habit.
• While doing the habit.
• After doing the habit.

In addition, you can celebrate any positive behavior — even those that you don’t design.

Also experiment with a celebration blitz. For example, go the messiest room in your house and spend three minutes cleaning it. Celebrate every single item that you toss an item or put it away.

You don’t have to celebrate a habit forever. But you can choose to celebrate it when you:

• Start doing it again after falling off
• Increase the intensity of the habit (such as doing deeper squats)
• Increase the duration of the habit (such doing 20 push ups instead of 2)

Creating “shine”

B.J. has a term for the positive feeling that comes with successful habit change — shine. Every time that you celebrate a habit change, you add a little more shine to the world.

This is a service to yourself and others. As B.J. notes:

Celebration will one day be ranked alongside mindfulness and gratitude as daily practices that contribute most to our overall happiness and well-being. If you learn just one thing from my entire book, I hope it’s this: Celebrate your tiny successes.

The A in B.J. Fogg’s ABC recipe for Tiny Habits stands for Anchor. This is included because all behavior follows a prompt (which B.J. also calls an anchor). If you don’t design a prompt for your desired habit, says B.J. — well, that behavior won’t happen.

One of the many cool things about the Tiny Habits program is applying this to your own life.

Immediately I saw that I live in a fog of unconsciousness. I encounter countless prompts each day without noticing them. All those prompts are triggering behaviors, and the whole process unfolds beneath my awareness.

In short, I’m living like a machine rather than a human being.

B.J.’s program offers a way wake up.

Recognize anchors

Some common anchors are:

• Starting a coffee maker
• Brushing teeth
• Turning on the shower
• Waking up in the morning
• Putting on shoes
• Starting a car
• Feeling the urge to snack
• Starting up a computer
• Starting a dishwasher
• Plugging in a phone to charge

Most anchors occur in the morning, but look for them in afternoon and evening as well.

Choose effective anchors

When designing Tiny Habits, your best bet for anchors are existing habits. Find behaviors that you do consistently.

Also make anchors precise. Look for the trailing edge of an anchor — how the behavior ends. For example:

• After I put down the carafe rather than After I pour coffee.
• After I start the dishwasher rather than After I finish dinner.
• After my feet hit the floor rather than After I get out of bed.

In addition, match anchors with your desired habit. Think in terms of:

• Physical location. Design a new habit to take place in the same location as an existing habit.
• Frequency. If you want to do the new habit twice a day, for example, then find an existing habit that you do twice per day.
• Theme or purpose. Say that your aspiration is to be more productive. Link your new habit to an existing habit that’s about being more productive.

B.J. gives this example of an anchor and habit that do not match: After I brush my teeth, I will sweep the garage.

Some anchors involve pockets of waiting time during the day. B.J. calls these “meanwhile” anchors. Examples include:

• After I turn on the shower, I will do two squats.
• After I stop at a red light, I will, I will take a mindful breath.
• After I get in line at the grocery store, I will think of one thing I’m grateful for.

Another interesting variation is the “pearl” habit. B.J describes these as “creating beauty from irritation.” For instance:

• After I feel insulted, I will think of something nice to do for myself.
• After I hear a car honk, I will smile.
• After I get in line at the grocery store, I will relax my face and neck.

Start with a list

Mentally review your typical day for useful anchors. Look for habits that you do:

• First thing in the morning
• Right before lunch
• During lunch
• Right after lunch
• At the end of the work day
• Right before you go to bed

Creating this list of your existing anchors — and keeping it updated — will make habit design easier.

It’s not motivation or “willpower” that changes behavior, says Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg. It’s simplicity.

If you want to succeed at habit change, then “go tiny.” Start with small behaviors that you can do even when you’re not motivated. Keep expectations low.

In his book Tiny Habits, B.J. recommends behaviors that might seem embarrassingly small, such as:

• Floss one tooth
• Pour a cup of water
• Read one sentence in a book
• Put on walking shoes
• Take one deep breath

All of these are things you can do when you lack motivation — a key factor in successful habit change.

Avoid the “motivation monkey”

Most of us experience moments when we feel highly motivated to do something hard — clean out the garage, for example, or weed a big garden.

But there’s a problem: Motivation is fickle and unpredictable. It changes from minute to minute and day to day.

Big spikes of motivation — the peak of the Motivation Wave — are useful for doing difficult, one-time tasks. But that peak is temporary.

B.J. urges us to avoid the “motivation monkey” — planning big behavior change that requires sustained and high motivation. This strategy puts us at the mercy of chance.

It also underestimates the role of ability in habit change. As B.J. says, “The harder a behavior is to do, the less likely you are to do it.”

The inverse is also true: Easy behaviors are more likely to get done. And, they create an instant feeling of success that reinforces the behavior.

Go tiny with these questions

Tiny behaviors present a low risk of failure. Designing such behaviors is a learned skill, however.

Start with the ability chain — a series of questions about what makes any behavior hard to do:

• Does it require too much money?
• Does it require too much time?
• Does it require too much effort, physical or mental?
• Does it disrupt of your daily routine?

Then ask the breakthrough question: How can you make a behavior easier to do? Some possibilities:

• Increase your skills by working with a coach or taking lessons.
• Access tools and resources, such as buying a new kitchen tool that makes it easy to slice veggies.
• Scaling back the behavior — for example, writing one sentence in your journal instead of a paragraph.

Also consider context: How can you change your environment to make a behavior easier? For instance, fill your refrigerator with ready-to-eat foods that you can have for snacks.

Consider these examples

To get started with Tiny Habits, take the five-day email course. It’s free.

B.J.’s book is excellent and filled with examples.

I’ve also heard B.J. repeatedly recommend two Tiny Habits.

One is: After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth.

Another is the the “Maui habit”: After I wake up and put my feet on the floor, I will say: It’s going to be a great day. This habit has an inspiring backstory — and it works.

You can sum up whole shelves full of self-help books in one sentence: If you want to be happy, then set goals and achieve them.

I’ve already posted about the flaws in this approach. Reading Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg reinforces my thinking.

Goal is a hopelessly ambiguous term, says B.J. It can refer to:

• Aspirations — abstract and enduring motivations such as I want to succeed in school.
• Outcomes — specific results, such as I want an A in this course.
• Behaviors — which can happen daily (habits) or occur less often.

These are different things. And if we forget this, our attempts to change behavior can fail.

B.J. does not talk about goals. Instead, he urges us to start with aspirations and outcomes. Then we can design specific behaviors to align with them.

Recognizing aspirations, outcomes and behaviors

Examples of aspirations include:

• Reducing stress
• Staying productive
• Losing weight
• Starting a business
• Saving for retirement

Note that these are abstract ideas. Wanting to reduce stress is fine, but what’s your next action? What will you actually do?

Outcomes are more concrete — for example:

• Finish a book manuscript
• Launch a personal website this month
• Lose 15 pounds this year

Even so, these still don’t specify concrete behaviors.

A behavior is something you can do right now. You can’t lose 15 pounds right now. But you can:

• Add one new fruit or vegetable to your grocery list.
• Do two pushups after you start the shower.
• Take one high-fat or high-carb food from your refrigerator and throw it away.

Knowing what you truly want in the long-term

To clarify aspirations and outcomes, we draw on a core skill in behavior change: self-insight. This means going beyond what you feel obligated to do — and random advice from online sources or friends about what you should do.

B.J. recommends designing habits that align the kind of person that you wish to become — for example, the kind of person who exercises, eats well, or (fill in the blank with your own aspirations). As you change habits, your identity will shift.

In addition, be patient. Our culture is based on instant gratification. Incremental transformation through habit change is not glamorous, but it works.

Matching aspirations with specific behaviors

Another core skill is behavior crafting. When considering any new habit, ask whether the behavior will help you:

• do what you already want to do
• feel successful.

If the answer to either question is No, then keep thinking.

More specifically, behavior crafting involves:

• Choosing habits that align with your aspirations
• Choosing how many new habits to adopt at one time — and when to add more
• Staying flexible about which habits you choose and going for variety
• Making habits easy to do

B.J. suggests a two-step process for behavior crafting.

First, brainstorm a list of behaviors that align with with an aspiration. B.J refers to this list as a swarm of Bs (behaviors). For this step, be imaginative. Wave a mental magic wand and assume for the moment that you can do any behavior that matches your aspiration.

Also be thorough. On your list, include one-time behaviors, habits to start, and habits to stop.

Second, refine your brainstormed list. Look for golden behaviors. These are behaviors that:

• You want to do
• You can do — even when you don’t feel motivated
• Make a positive impact on your life

Here we transition to another skill in behavior design — start tiny, the subject of my next post.

My previous post about Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg described transformation as incremental — the result of many small behavior changes over time. B.J. refers to these changes as Tiny Habits, and each one consists of three elements.

Behavior

An ideal Tiny Habit:

• Fits with your existing behaviors
• Takes less than 30 seconds to do
• Is easy — something you will do even when your motivation is low
• Is something you can do right now
• Is something that you truly want to do

For example:

• Instead of saying that you’ll floss all of your teeth, plan to floss just one.
• Instead of saying that you will meditate for 20 minutes, plan to just take one mindful breath.
• Instead of saying that you do yoga for 30 minutes, plan to just step on your mat.
• Instead of saying that you will walk for one hour, plan to just put on your walking shoes.

Do these examples seem absurdly small? They did to me at first. But after experimenting with Tiny Habits, I confirmed something that B.J. says: Small behaviors tend to expand over time. Flossing one tooth leads to flossing more teeth. Taking one mindful breath expands into 10, 20, and more.

In addition, keeping the behavior small allows you to feel successful right away — a pivotal factor in behavior change.

Anchor

Once you choose a tiny behavior, figure out exactly where it fits in your day. Your best bet is to do it after an existing habit that’s stable. B.J. calls this habit an anchor.

Common examples of anchors include:

• Getting out of bed in the morning
• Taking a shower
• Starting a coffee maker
• Brushing teeth
• Turning on the shower

Celebration

Finally, plan to reward yourself for actually doing the tiny behavior. According to B.J., what creates stable habits is not repetition but positive emotion: “People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.”

There are many ways to celebrate. Your way of celebrating is unique to you. It can be as simple as saying Yes! to yourself or smiling while nodding your head.

Put it in writing

Capture your Anchor and Behavior in a single sentence with this syntax: After I…I will.

For example:

• After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth. 
• After I wake up in the morning, I will open a window and take a few deep breaths.
• After I put on my shoes in the morning, I will go outside to soak in the natural light.
• After I turn on the shower, I will say a quiet prayer of gratitude.
• After I pour my coffee or tea, I will open my journal.

Add your method of celebrating, and you have a complete recipe for your Tiny Habit. B.J. recommends that you rehearse this new behavior and celebration 7 to 10 times immediately after you design it.

This ABC recipe for Tiny Habits — Anchor, Behavior, Celebration — is deceptively simple. Finding an appropriate anchor, choosing a behavior that is small enough, and celebrating in a way that feels authentic is not easy.

The key is to see habit design as a skill. And like any skill, habit design evolves through practice and feedback. As the old slogan goes, it’s about progress — not perfection.