Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

Sometimes bad habits interfere with good habits, but it’s possible to design them out of one’s life.

Juni, a successful radio talk show host, had a sweet tooth. When things stressed her out, she’d eat bubblegum ice cream and other sugary favorites. When her mother died, she handled the funeral arrangements and was strong for her stunned siblings, but she stuffed down her own grief with more food, gained more weight, and sometimes struggled to stay focused at work. At a Tiny Habits boot camp, she realized she needed to create habits that would help her process the loss.

She talked it out with supportive friends and wrote in a journal. She also replaced sugary snacks with healthier alternatives, and began a habit of not eating sugar during a single meal, which grew into two hours, then an entire day, and finally a week with no sugar. If she backslid, she’d reverse-engineer the event and redesign her Tiny Habits.

Substance abuse is beyond the scope of Tiny Habits, but “downhill habits,” those that are easy to do and hard to stop, such as hitting the snooze button, cursing, or bingeing online videos, can yield to the Tiny Habits techniques. Rather than building prompts, you remove them; rather than increasing motivation, you decrease it.

People try to “break” a bad habit, but this isn’t how habits get resolved. A better word is “untangle.” The best approach is to begin with the easiest knot to untie. Juni undid her most accessible prompts, like stashing ice cream in the home fridge; she also started a Tiny Habit of avoiding sugary desserts at a single meal each day.

The author’s “Behavior Change Masterplan” (203) contains three phases: creating a new habit, stopping the old habit, and—if needed—swapping the new habit for the old.

In the first phase, it’s best to start with new habits unrelated to the bad habits you want to get rid of. Simple, relatively unemotional items are easier work with. In the process, a new, more positive identity begins to form that later can take on the untangling process.

The second phase uses the Swarm of Behaviors technique to ferret out the many little habits that make up the one bad General Habit. This involves writing the main bad habit inside a cloud shape, then listing all the things that contribute to that habit in boxes that surround the cloud. For eating too much junk food, the Swarm might include buying breakfast at a gas station, drinking soda at lunch, eating chips while watching TV, and so on. Each of these specific habits can be dealt with relatively easily, whereas the General Habit of eating junk food is much harder to overcome.

Making a list of all those little bad habits might at first feel distressing, but isolating each one and knowing they can be reengineered to disappear means the General Habit can be untangled, which is good news. The best specific habit to start on is the easiest one, not the hardest. Success with the first, easy habit will lead to more success and a growing ability to untangle the harder ones.

The next step is to remove, avoid, or ignore the prompt from the specific habit. For example, to stop following social media at work, create the habit of switching off those notifications on your devices when you reach your desk. To avoid prompts, design your day so you don’t encounter places, people, or media that prompt you. If the prompt is unavoidable, ignoring it is the last resort: It relies on willpower, which tends to fail, especially during stressful times.

If a prompt for a specific habit persists, the next step is to make it harder to do. By examining the habit’s Ability Chain, you can find ways to make a habit more time-consuming, more expensive, physically harder to do, mentally harder (i.e., extra password steps to join a time-wasting media site), or in conflict with a routine you’d rather do.

If prompts and abilities can’t be managed, the third step is to alter motivation. This is the hardest step to accomplish because motivation is so tricky to manage, but it’s possible. Removing stressors earlier in the day can reduce motivation to overeat or drink in the evening; getting enough sleep can reduce the use of the snooze button; wearing a nicotine patch will lessen cigarette cravings; eating well before a party will weaken the desire to eat junk there. Penalizing yourself for doing a bad behavior is an option, but it merely introduces a conflicting motivation rather than reducing the unwanted motivation; also, it adds stress and can be demoralizing.

Another approach is to scale back the bad habit by doing less of it. Often, people discover they don’t need as much of the old habit as they thought.

The third phase is to swap an old habit for a new one. This can be challenging, especially if the new habit is something that “should” be done but isn’t intrinsically desirable. The secret, once again, is to use the techniques described in Chapter 2 to find a new habit that works well, that you want to do, and that you can do. Use the old prompt, which triggered the old habit, to remind you to do the new habit. As with all Tiny Habits, you then celebrate and feel Shine.

If the old habit persists, it’s easier and/or more motivating than the new habit. Fix this by making the new habit easier and more motivating, and the old habit harder and less motivating. Also, consider moving to a different specific bad habit from the Swarm of Behaviors you’ve created, one that might be easier to flip.

As people remove bad habits and replace them with good ones, this causes ripple effects in their relationships, giving others more room to treat each other a little better.

Mike and Carla were at their wits’ end: Their 21-year-old son, Chris, had bombed out of university, was living at home, had trouble paying his bills, and spent most of his time playing video games. He was sullen, left a mess in the kitchen, and dragged down everyone’s mood. His parents tried to scold him into behaving better, but failed.

Mike attended a Tiny Habits training, returned home, and tried a small thing: He asked Chris if he’d be willing, after using the coffee maker, to leave the dirty filter on the counter. Chris shrugged ok, and the next day it was on the counter. Mike thanked him. The next day and the next, the filter was on the counter. After two weeks, Mike asked if Chris would rinse out the filter before putting it on the counter. Chris did that, too, and got thanked. A week later, the filter wasn’t on the counter—it was in the coffee maker, cleaned. This tiny experiment bloomed into a series of improvements; soon, Chris was participating more at meals and confiding in his parents. He even bought his dad a special present for his birthday.

Mike and Carla realized that Chris feels overwhelmed with large projects; breaking them into small habits he can handle. Chris’s improvement encouraged his parents and their attitudes improved, which caused a cycle of mutual reinforcement.

To change group dynamics, start by doing small things that help people achieve their own aspirations and help them feel successful. In the process, they’ll become more favorably disposed to what you also want to improve within the group. Since you’re helping them make improvements they want, “you’re likely on solid ethical ground” (236). This can happen whether you’re acting as group leader—a “Ringleader”—or acting more subtly—a “Ninja.”

A Ringleader can suggest lead a Swarm of Behaviors and Focus Mapping project. A Ninja can make a small suggestion, as Mike did with Chris, and celebrate with the other person when it succeeds, without explaining the technique.

When a group has an assignment, the Ringleader can suggest and discuss what the group’s aspiration is. A Ninja can suggest a more focused aspiration by describing her understanding of what the group wants and asking if this is correct. To explore options for achieving the objective, a Ringleader might initiate a Swarm of Behaviors brainstorming session; a Ninja could bring up questions, like asking what group members might try if they could do anything, or if they had magic powers—a version of Magic Wanding.

To create a group’s Focus Map, a Ringleader has everyone write ideas onto cards. Then group members take turns moving the cards up or down to represent their sense of the various ideas’ levels of impact, and right or left to represent ease of ability to do them. Several rounds of this continue until everyone is satisfied with the map. The group then focuses on the upper-right Golden Behaviors and selects one or two to work on. This process can be surprisingly quick. (For more information, see FocusMap.info.) A Ninja, after encouraging a group to generate ideas, asks which option they can realistically get themselves to do (242-43).

After the new behavior takes hold, roadblocks will appear. The Ringleader asks group members the Discovery Question: “What is making this daily routine hard to do?” (243) The responses can be looked at as Ability Chain links that can be strengthened. If a coworker or partner isn’t onboard with the new activity, the Ninja asks what’s hard about that activity, then uses the answer to make the behavior simpler and/or more attractive.

To create an effective prompt, the Ringleader asks the group where the new behavior would fit easily in their day, then helps each member to set an Anchor that works for them. The Ninja asks similar questions, including simply what they think would make a good reminder. If several people use the same prompt successfully, the Ringleader or Ninja can point this out to the rest of the group.

To generate Shine, the Ringleader explains how celebrating small wins generates feelings of success; the leader also encourages team members by celebrating their new behaviors, which will inspire members to celebrate each other. The Ninja is profuse with praise, makes note of the compliments that most inspire individuals, and tailors compliments accordingly. (A list of 32 affirmative comments is in the Appendix on Page 286.)

To troubleshoot the process, the Ringleader explains to the group the importance of iteration, experimentation, and continual revising. If he’s in charge of generating participation in a new campaign, a Ninja studies results of his efforts, notices those who seem to want to participate but are having trouble doing so, and improvises ways to make participation easier. For those who seem uninterested, especially in campaigns where all members must join in, the Ninja adds incentives, rewards, or other methods to encourage them to participate.

Amy’s daughter Rachel has ADHD; she struggled with paying attention and getting her homework done. Amy asked her how she would feel if her friends all moved forward into the next grade but Rachel stayed behind. Rachel didn’t like that idea, so they worked together to find ways to incorporate Rachel’s homework into her after-school life. They devised tiny habits, like setting out work sheets and estimating the number of minutes Rachel would need to finish her homework, and interspersed each small bit of homework achievement with celebrations and recreation.

Rachel got better and better at these new habits, and they spilled over into other aspects of her life. Eventually, Rachel got so good at schoolwork that she graduated with honors.

The author and Linda, his older sister, consulted with a hospital whose staff suffered from severe burnout. The employees were so busy, they didn’t drink enough water because it would make them take more bathroom breaks. Exhausted, their work and home lives suffered.

The staff made a list of possible anchors and connected them to very simple habits like smiling, taking a deep breath, or taking a sip of water. As staffers learned to celebrate their new habits, they began spontaneously to celebrate each other’s wins as well. The training improved their ability to handle stress.

As with the other chapters, the conclusion of Chapter 8 contains practice exercises, and the first one is about teaching a group how to develop and use a Swarm of Behaviors to form new habits:

Step 5: Ask people to put a star by the five behaviors that would be the most effective in helping them reach their aspiration. Step 6: Ask people to circle any behavior they could get themselves to do. The behaviors with both stars and circles are their Golden Behaviors (260).

This is a variation on the Focus Map described in Chapter 2. As long as the process results in a set of Golden Behaviors that are impactful and easy to do, the exact shape of the Focus Mapping process isn’t critical.

After Linda suffered several crises—her spouse’s early-onset Alzheimer’s, a bankruptcy, and the death of her son—she became adept at Tiny Habits and helped the author teach it to a growing number of students. Together, they developed a much bigger program, taught more coaches, and expanded their reach.

This also helped the author to fulfill a promise he’d made to himself after having a dream about dying, in which he felt, not fear, but regret that he hadn’t put his work out into the world where it would do the most good.

The author urges his readers to share their newfound knowledge about behavior change with friends, relatives, and colleagues. They also can initiate change in groups and communities by remembering to help others find new ways to do what they already want to do, and by helping people feel successful. They should, of course, also help themselves to do the same.

In 2007, the author taught a class on how to create apps for Facebook; students used principles of behavior change to attract 24 million users. Inspired by the results, and concerned that the methods he taught are so powerful that they can be used for bad purposes, the author also taught a class in using behavior change for world peace. The system, now called Peace Innovation, is taught worldwide from a headquarters in The Hague.