I have spent the last few blog posts making the case to take an inventory on your current habits and recognize the power habits have in determining whether or not you reach your goals. I’ve also shared my personal transformation with my health thanks to a series of habit changes I’ve made.
Now that I (hopefully) have convinced you that habits are a game changer to reaching your goals, I want to provide you a simple to understand 3-step formula for creating a new habit. I learned this formula from the book Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg and encourage you to read it if you want a deep dive into habit formation.
Stanford University researcher BJ Fogg said that “you change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad,” and thus his formula for creating a new habit is focused on this feeling-good idea. An additional tip that he found in creating a new habit is to “habit stack.” This means that you identify an existing habit that you already do and want to keep doing, and stack a new habit so it occurs immediately after the existing habit.
For instance, I wanted to start a new habit of taking an apple cider vinegar shot before I eat my dinner each night to aid my gut health and digestion. This is a noble tiny habit, but very easy to forget as you’re prepping for dinner. To remember to do this habit I decided that as I’m retrieving the silverware to set the dinner table I also grab a soup spoon so I remember to take the apple cider vinegar shot. Once the soup spoon is in my hands, I pull out the apple cider vinegar from the pantry and take a shot of it before setting the table. Habit remembered!
But there’s more to habit creation than just remembering to do it. The “Anchor” of the Habit is Step 1 of habit creation, as it triggers your brain that now is the time to do the habit. My anchor for improving gut health and digestion is grab the soup spoon as I’m getting ready to set the dinner table.
The second step in habit creation is the actual action you want to take as your new habit. For aiding gut health and digestion, this would be grabbing the apple cider vinegar from the pantry and taking a shot of it, followed by water.
The third and final step is hugely important not to skip, and goes back to the idea that “you change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.” This final step is to Celebrate that you performed the habit. You can do this by smiling to yourself, making a celebratory noise, high fiving the air, whatever you want, but it needs to be a physical action you take that brings good feelings to the brain. This helps the brain wire in the fact that this action invokes positive emotion in you, so you want to do it again.
In future posts I’ll explain how to identify which tiny habits to start based on your aspirational goals that you have, but for now, just remember to habit stack and create an Anchor to trigger the brain that now is the time to start the habit, then Do the Habit, and finally Celebrate that the habit has been completed so you encourage the brain to want to perform the habit again.
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