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Have you ever tried to introduce a new habit (or kick an old one) and flopped? In Tiny Habits, Stanford behavioral scientist BJ Fogg diagnoses why you failed and shows you how to succeed next time. The Tiny Habits method is judgment-free and science-based, and it has resulted in success for thousands of people around the world.

Find out why relying on motivation will get you nowhere, what you should do instead, and why you should celebrate in style after each tiny win. Tiny Habits will show you how flossing one tooth can lead to something great, one tiny step at a time.

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5. Choose your prompt. Remember, no behavior happens without a prompt. Once you’ve identified which tiny behavior you want to introduce into your life, you need to find a good prompt to remind you to do it. You can tie this prompt to yourself (some kind of internal emotional or physical cue), your context, or an action in a pre-existing routine. Action-based prompts are special in Tiny Habits. They’re called Anchors.

For example, a person-based prompt for the lavender bath might be “when I feel tired at night.” For a context-based prompt, you could leave the lavender oil bottle in the bathroom where you can see it. And for an Anchor, you could decide to do your tiny habit right after you’ve put the kids to bed.

6. Celebrate. Celebration is incredibly important in Tiny Habits. In fact, celebrating well is a habit in its own right, one that we can cultivate to make us happier, more resilient, and nicer to be around. Experiment to find some celebrations that work for you. Aim for celebrations that make you feel “Shine”: an authentic sense of accomplishment and happiness. Perhaps your best route to Shine is raising your fists in victory, or humming a snatch of the theme song from Rocky, or nodding your head quietly to yourself in affirmation. A genuine celebration immediately after you do your habit helps your brain to encode and automatize the behavior sequence, so it’s important not to skip this step.

For example, a good celebration for the tiny behavior of unscrewing the cap on the lavender oil bottle might be smiling wide, yawning, and stretching luxuriously.

7. Repeat, refine, and upgrade. The Behavior Design process is like an experiment. Play around with the sequence and modify things as you go. If your tiny habit isn’t working, go back to your Swarm of Bs and pick another one. If the prompt you’ve chosen is unreliable or if you’ve become good at ignoring it, pick another one. Remember that if a new habit fails, the problem isn’t you—it’s how the habit has been designed.

When repeating, refining, and upgrading, you gradually expand the Tiny Habit to make it less tiny. You allow it to grow naturally, not pushing yourself to build it up too fast or getting down on yourself if you mess up. In time, your tiny habit of unscrewing the cap on the lavender oil bottle may evolve into a luxurious hour-long bubble bath. Sometimes, of course, you won’t have time for this, and sometimes you won’t have the motivation. The important thing is to keep the habit alive by unscrewing that bottle cap every day.

Shedding Bad Habits

Though Tiny Habits wasn’t initially designed to help people get rid of bad habits, you can also apply the Fogg Behavior Model and the Behavior Design process to “reverse engineer” habits out of your life. This doesn’t apply to serious addictions, however—Tiny Habits aren’t a substitute for professional help.

To begin with, we can classify habits into three types: Uphill Habits, which we have to work to keep going (going to the gym every day, getting up early, cleaning the kitchen), Downhill Habits, which we have to work to stop doing (scrolling through social media, sleeping through the alarm, eating fast food), and Freefall Habits, which are almost impossible to stop (serious addictions). When applying Tiny Habits to bad habits, we’re talking about the Downhill Habits.

How to Eliminate Downhill Habits

We usually use the word “break” when talking about stopping a bad habit, but this metaphor doesn’t work in the Tiny Habits context. A better metaphor is a complicated snarl of knots in a string. We’re unraveling this tangle one knot at a time. When approaching a tangle like this, you work on the easiest, most accessible part first.

To eliminate an existing habit, apply the Fogg Behavior Model and the Behavior Design process in reverse.

If the behavior is already happening, there must be a regular convergence of Motivation, Ability, and Prompt in your daily routine. Can you disrupt one or more of these factors to stop the behavior from happening?

  • Can you reduce your Motivation to do the behavior? (This is hardest; leave it until last.)
  • Can you reduce your Ability to do the behavior? (This is a good bet. Think about ways to make the activity physically harder, mentally harder, more expensive, and more time-consuming.)
  • Can you get rid of the Prompt, or at least reduce its effectiveness? (Perhaps you can stop walking down the junk food aisle at the supermarket, or silence your phone, or delete a social media app.)

Apply the Behavior Design steps. Go through the seven steps of Behavior Design to design away the existing behavior. Perhaps the overall problem is “Eating junk food.” Create a Swarm of current Bs that feed the general problem, for example: “Eating a chocolate muffin in my morning break,” “Ordering hamburgers when I’m too tired to cook,” “Eating ice cream when I’m feeling down,” and so on. Which of these will be easiest to stop? Focus on that one first. See if you can manipulate the Ability and Prompt dimensions to design it away and introduce a healthier version in its place. And don’t forget to celebrate when you do your new, healthier habit.

When the first habit has fallen away, pick the second-easiest knot to untangle, and patiently work through the rest of them one by one. If you’re struggling, it may help to:

  • Substitute a new habit for the old one. Remap the prompt so that it prompts you to do another behavior. Ideally, this behavior should be both easier and more motivating than the one you’re trying to get rid of. This is very individual, but someone who loves flowers could, for example, walk past the bakery to the florist and buy a beautiful bunch of flowers.
  • Refashion the prompt. Find the prompt that triggers your unwanted behavior and begin to associate it with a new behavior. For example, if you usually open the fridge and grab the first thing you see in there, open the fridge and take three deep breaths instead. Remember to celebrate to lock in this new response.
  • Experiment. If it doesn’t work the first time, choose another new behavior and try again. Remember that if you’re shopping for shoes, you usually don’t buy the first pair you try on. Treat finding the substitute behavior like shopping for shoes. If one pair doesn’t fit, keep looking.
  • Try a substitute behavior for a limited period (three days; a week) and evaluate after that.
  • Get to know your own weak points and take advantage of them. For Fogg, making a behavior physically difficult is the best way to get rid of it.
  • If nothing changes, leave the bad habit alone for a while. Go back and sharpen your behavior change skills on other changes. Come back to the habit later.

It’s important to work skillfully with emotions when breaking bad habits. In both cases, we take judgments such as “character” and “weakness” out of the equation. When unraveling old habits, we bypass the feelings of shame and powerlessness that often accompany habits we’d like to stop.

Changing in a Group

When applying the Behavior Design process in a group, first make sure you have some experience applying it to yourself individually. This gives you confidence that you can iron out any bugs as they come along.

When leading group change, you can take either of two roles: the Ringleader or the Ninja. The Ringleader, perhaps a formal authority figure or a family member who’s read Tiny Habits and wants to apply it, openly explains the Fogg Behavior Model and guides the group through the Behavior Design steps. The Ninja, perhaps a team member lower down on the hierarchy or the parent of teenage children, slips Behavior Design principles into general discussions to make sure the change process stays on track.

For example, during Focus Mapping, a Ringleader might draw the Impact and Feasibility axes on a whiteboard and ask group members to come up and arrange Swarm of B index cards. A Ninja might highlight Impact and Feasibility by asking the group, “But how effective will this actually be?” and “Can we really get ourselves to do this?”

The Future of Tiny Habits

Through Tiny Habits, the tiniest changes in our behavior can ripple out and have far-reaching effects, both in our own lives and in the lives of others. The method has worked with hundreds of individuals and families, often leading to profound positive changes in people’s identities or in family dynamics. Large organizations, such as hospitals, are also turning to Fogg for help with problems like employee burnout. He’s found that the method is as effective for groups as it is for individuals, but it needs to be tailored to fit every time.

Fogg envisages a future in which we can use his behavior change methods to tackle complex global problems, one Tiny Habit at a time.

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PDF Summary Introduction

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Behavior Design stops you from getting caught in this cycle. In Behavior Design, we look at behavior patterns scientifically and with curiosity. If you fail to introduce a habit, it’s because the habit is badly designed. Simply redesign it and try again.

Positive emotions, rather than negative emotions, are the key. We change best when we feel good. Tiny bursts of celebration help our brains to “wire in” the changes automatically.

The best example of the Behavior Design approach is the Tiny Habits method.

Tiny Habits

Why should we work with tiny habits?

Tiny Habits are:

  • Low on time demand. Many of us have full lives and little time to fit in new habits. The idea of a daily ten-second habit is less daunting (and more realistic) than a half-hour one. The typical Tiny Habit takes under 30 seconds. You can do many of the habits suggested in the book in under five seconds. This means you can fit them in easily, no matter how busy you are.
  • Effective immediately. A well-designed Tiny Habit is one you can start right now.
  • Psychologically safe.
    • Wobbles—even faceplants—are part of the process. Babies fall all the time when...
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PDF Summary Chapter 1: The Fogg Behavior Model

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Note that this model does not model the general characteristics of a behavior. Instead, it applies to one instance of the behavior at a given point in time.

For example, let’s say you want to introduce the behavior of going to the gym. Your motivation to do this will vary from moment to moment. Your ability will also vary: Sometimes it’s easier to go to the gym (perhaps when you have less going on at work) and sometimes it’s more difficult. And at any point in time, you may or may not have a prompt reminding you to go to the gym.

The model doesn’t help us much with the general idea of going to the gym, because there’s so much variation in M, A, and P. But if we think instead about going to the gym right now, the motivation and prompt components are more fixed. Now we can apply the model with more accuracy.

Tiny Habits uses the Fogg Behavior Model as its basis.

The Action Line

By looking at the “Action Line,” we can work out whether or not a behavior will be performed.

Let’s plot Motivation and Ability as the axes on a graph. The Action Line is a curve marking the threshold at which an action will be...

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PDF Summary Chapter 2: Behavior Design Phase 1—Selection

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Use the Magic Wanding approach. If you had magical powers and infinite resources, what would you do? Move to a tropical island? Get a job that pays double? Hire a live-in housekeeper? Let your optimism do the talking, and be creative. The Swarm of Bs should be as diverse as you can make it. There should always be some answers that surprise you alongside the obvious, logical ones.

It may help to generate ideas under three categories: one-off behaviors (for example, deleting a social media app from your phone or buying a set of high-quality kitchen knives for food prep); fresh habits to cultivate; and unhelpful habits to drop.

After you have your Swarm of Bs, check that the Bs are well-defined. Take any that are fuzzy or poorly defined (for example, “snack on fruit once a day”) and see if you can make them clearer and crisper: “Eat an apple every day after lunch.”

If you’re not sure how to define your behavior clearly, ask yourself three questions.

  1. Is it a one-off behavior, or will you repeat it?
  2. What exactly will you be doing? (Remember the advice from the previous chapter on the difference between behaviors, outcomes, and aspirations. Ask yourself...
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PDF Summary Chapter 3: Behavior Design Phase 2—Design

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  • Do I have enough time to do this?
  • Do I have enough money to do this?
  • Does this require a lot of physical effort?
  • Does this require a lot of mental effort?
  • Can I incorporate this easily into my daily routine?

Let’s say you want to start eating blueberries as a daily snack.

  • Time. Eating blueberries doesn’t take a lot of time.
  • Money. Fresh blueberries can be quite expensive.
  • Physical effort. Eating blueberries doesn’t require much physical effort.
  • Mental effort. Eating blueberries doesn’t require mental effort.
  • Daily routine. It’s easy to incorporate eating blueberries into most daily routines.

The weak link for this habit seems to be money. Because fresh blueberries are expensive, perhaps you don’t buy enough when you go to the store to be able to eat them every day.

Because money is the weakest link, this should be the target of your solution. Buying blueberries frozen or in bulk might be the trick to establishing this habit in your life.

Once we’ve diagnosed the problem, we need to generate solutions.

**The breakthrough question is: How can I...

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PDF Summary Chapter 4.1: Behavior Design Process Phase 3—Practice (Celebration)

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Because of this, celebrating is the very first skill you should tackle when starting out with Tiny Habits. Once people implement this step, it changes their whole outlook. Many actually start wanting to do their new habits just so they can celebrate afterwards.

Celebration is the core of Fogg Behavior Maxim #2: Help people feel successful. Note that this isn’t “Help people be successful.” Actual success, externally measured, isn’t important. It’s the ability to feel successful that we’re aiming for—which for many of us can be even more challenging than achieving external success.

Celebration is important because through celebration we cultivate the important skill of making ourselves feel good. This is important not only when working with new habits, but also in building emotional resilience in the face of challenging life circumstances.

Above all, celebration is a way to practice being kind to yourself. Many of us could use some extra skills in this area. Celebration helps us defy society’s unrealistic expectations about behavior change and switch to a gentler, more sustainable way of being.

In fact, **if you have children or if you spend time caring for...

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PDF Summary Chapter 4.2: Behavior Design Process Phase 3—Practice (Repeat, Refine, Upgrade)

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Here are the five broad skill sets we draw on in Behavior Design:

  • 1. Strategy
  • 2. Clarity
  • Process
  • 4. Environment
  • 5. Attitude

We’ll go through each of these in turn. You’ve already learned a few of the skills in each—so for each skill set, we’ll point out the skills you already know and add one more.

1. Strategy

Strategy is knowing how to approach the behavior change process in a way that’ll work for you (or a person you’re helping). It includes selecting habits intelligently, refining them thoughtfully, and walking the line between too few and too many new habits at the same time.

The Strategy skill set includes the previous skills of:

  • Generating options (Swarm of Bs)
  • Identifying Golden Behaviors
  • Manipulating the Ability dimension

Plus a new skill: Maintaining a bird’s-eye view of your habit landscape.

Pull back and scan your garden. Are any parts overgrown (too densely planted or in need of a good weeding)? Is there any space where you could plant some new habits?

To build Strategy skills:

  • Follow your natural tendencies. Would you prefer to sprinkle lots of little habits throughout...
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PDF Summary Chapter 5: Unraveling Bad Habits

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  • Downhill Habits require no effort to maintain and effort to stop. Sleeping in, scrolling through social media, and going back for seconds are usually downhill habits.
  • Freefall Habits are addictions and other serious problems that require professional intervention. Tiny Habits is not designed to deal with Freefall Habits.

Up until now, we’ve mostly been talking about Uphill Habits. This chapter deals with the Downhill variety.

We usually use the word “break” when talking about stopping a bad habit, but this metaphor doesn’t work in the Tiny Habits context. A better metaphor is a complicated snarl of knots in a string. We’re unraveling this tangle one knot at a time. When approaching a tangle like this, you don’t unravel it all at once. You don’t go for the hardest bit first. You work on the easiest, most accessible part first.

Think about it as a design issue. If you can engineer a habit you want into your life, you can reverse engineer a habit you don’t want out of your life.

“Bad” habits and “good” habits have the same structure—the only difference is the value that you (or society) have attached to the habit. To unravel these habits, you simply...

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PDF Summary Chapter 6: Changing With Others

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  • Start with Fogg Maxim #1: “Help people do something they already want to do.” Get clear on the group’s aspirations.
  • Understand that all groups are unique and there’s no cure-all prescription. Group changes need to be tailored, just as individual ones do.

The Ringleader and the Ninja

As a behavior change leader, you can take on one of two roles.

The Ringleader is a clearly recognizable leadership role. As a Ringleader, you openly explain and guide the Behavior Design process. Perhaps you’re a manager at a company; perhaps you’re a family member who reads this book and decides to introduce some Tiny Habits at home. As a Ringleader, you explain Behavior Design principles systematically and build your group’s enthusiasm and knowledge around behavior change.

The Ninja is an undercover role. Perhaps you’re a work team member and don’t want to step on the manager’s toes by overtly championing change; perhaps you have adolescent children who you know will resist any kind of “system” you suggest. As a Ninja, you smuggle Behavior Design principles and methods into group discussions.

The Ringleader and the Ninja follow the same steps but use different...

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PDF Summary Chapter 7: Conclusion

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The two Tiny Habits coaches helped the nurses think of a list of Anchors and a list of positive new habits (take a deep breath, smile at someone nearby, take a sip of water, ask for help, say “thank you”). They mixed and matched these lists into complete Tiny Habit recipes. Here are some examples:

  • After I park my car, I will take three deep breaths.

  • After I walk in the door, I will think, Today I’m helping people to heal.

  • After I see each patient, I will make eye contact and smile.

The nurses celebrated alone, as they’d been taught, but quickly started celebrating each other’s successes as well. Someone who drank water got a round of applause. Another person who sat down to rest got a high five.

The nurses had filled out a questionnaire before the Tiny Habits seminar series, and they repeated it three months later. There were statistically significant improvements in the nurses’ stress reduction habits, their self-reported stress management, their ability to build resilience, and their ability to recognize positive events at work. The Tiny Habits method for group change, based on individual nurses implementing their own self-care recipes, is...

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