Tiny Habits

The Small Changes That Change Everything

B.J. Fogg

4/5

"I really liked it"

Tiny Habits, written by B.J. Fogg, is a practical, step-by-step guide for forming and breaking habits. I generally agree with Fogg’s model of behaviors, \(Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt\), and it’s a genuinely useful tool for analyzing and adjusting habits. One specific thing I appreciate about Tiny Habits is that the author doesn’t assume you come into the book with a list of habits you want; the book helps you consider your life aspirations, and curate habits that support those aspirations.

My main criticism of Tiny Habits stems from a lack of scientific backing for many of the statements made in the book. Instead of data, Fogg chose to use a handful of case studies for almost every concept. It’s not really helpful for me to see how 5 amazing people applied Tiny Habits to change their lives; it feels like an appeal to selection bias, and I wanted more concrete data on how well these concepts work.

An unrelated but interesting thing I noticed several times throughout the book is the author’s confidence. There were 3—5 statements to the effect of “the world doesn’t understand this concept now, but it will realize it eventually.”

The book is definitely practical; it would be hard to read this book and not see how the advice fits into your life right now. Fogg gives helpful examples for difficult concepts, and each chapter ends with multiple exercises you can do to practice what you’ve learned. The book highly encourages you to create multiple habits whilst reading the book, and at the end, there’s an appendix containing some helpful media like flow charts, images, and large lists of examples. If you know me, you know I love a practical book. If I spend hours and hours reading something, I want to get something out of it. This book delivered.

Tiny Habits vs Atomic Habits

I recently read Atomic Habits, and gave it a 4/5 (“I really liked it”). After reading some other reviews of the book, I stumbled across this book, Tiny Habits. The two are similar in proposition— James Clear meant “small” by the word “atomic”— and I thought it would be interesting to compare their approaches to habits.

After reviewing my notes from both books, I was surprised at how much wisdom is shared. Several important concepts appear in both books with slightly different wording. I think it’s useful to do this comparison because it shows me what concepts are more likely to be true. Here’s a non-comprehensive list of similar concepts and lessons between Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits:

• It’s good to have goals, but you should focus on changing your behaviors, otherwise nothing happens.
• Every habit has a “prompt” or “cue”, and by adjusting this prompt, you can adjust the behavior (e.g. if TV ads make you hungry then you eat, then stop watching TV)
• Successful habits have immediate rewards (dopamine)
• To help master new habits, try to change your identity: tell yourself “I am a person who…” and be that person.
• Stick to habits that come naturally to you
• Willpower/motivation is hard to adjust and doesn’t really work for long-term behavior change.
• The easiest and most statistically successful way to start a new habit is by “stacking” it on top of a specific existing habit (e.g. after I put down my toothbrush, I will do 2 push-ups on the bathroom floor).

Takeaways

(Some of these are copied from the section above.)

• Behaviors only happen when a person is sufficiently motivated, has sufficient ability to perform the behavior, and is prompted by something. By adjusting motivation, ability, or prompt, you can adjust behaviors (read: habits).
• Work with yourself! Pick things you have a natural strength at, lower your expectations, be flexible, and focus on doing the bare minimum to maintain your habit. Anything extra is just that— extra!
• The strongest habits involve a release of dopamine during or immediately after the habit. By “celebrating” your successes, you can give yourself that dopamine. It may feel awkward, but it’s important.
• It’s good to have goals, but you should focus on changing your behaviors, otherwise nothing happens.
• To help master new habits, try to change your identity: tell yourself “I am a person who…” and be that person.
• The easiest and most statistically successful way to start a new habit is by “stacking” it on top of a specific existing habit (e.g. after I put down my toothbrush, I will do 2 push-ups on the bathroom floor).

Full Notes

Fogg Behavior Model

$$B = MAP$$

A behavior (B) occurs when these 3 criteria are met:

1. (M) Motivation
2. (A) Ability
3. (P) Prompt

When you want to do a behavior, or want someone else to do a behavior, follow these 3 steps in order:

1. Check to see if there’s a prompt to do the behavior.
2. See if the person has the ability to do the behavior.
3. See if the person is motivated to do the behavior.

• Motivation is unreliable.

• When it comes to changing their behavior for the better, people largely believe it’s mostly about personal agency and choice.

• It’s good to have goals, but goals are not behaviors— they’re not things you can do right now.

  • I’ve found that people don’t naturally think in terms of specific behaviors, and this tendency trips up almost everyone.

  • In Tiny Habits, the author doesn’t like the word “goal” and instead prefers “aspiration” (a dream) or “outcome” (a more specific end state).

Behavior Design

1. Clarify the aspiration

   • What is your dream?
   • E.g., “reduce stress”

2. Explore behavior options

   • What specific behaviors could help you achieve your aspiration?
   • You’re not making any commitments— it’s just a brainstorm.
   • E.g., “walk every evening”
   • Consider asking your friends and family for ideas

3. Match with specific behaviors

   • A “Golden Behavior” has 3 characteristics:
     1. The behavior is effective in realizing your aspiration (impact)
     2. You want to do the behavior (motivation)
     3. You can do the behavior (ability)
   • Fogg came up with a method called “Focus Mapping” to identify golden behaviors
     • Basically, you draw 2 axes: X-axis is “how likely am I to do this behavior”, and Y-axis is “how effective is this behavior”.
     • Plot all the behaviors, and the top-right corner will contain Golden Behaviors (“I am likely to do it” and “it is highly effective”)

4. Find a good prompt

   • Following the “PAC Person” model, there are 3 types of prompts:
     • Person: something inside of you (e.g. hunger)
     • Action: an existing routine prompts the next action. This is like “habit stacking” from Atomic Habits— Fogg even calls it a “habit sequence”
       • Action prompts are the “best” type of prompt, because they’re easy, they’re already in your life every day
       • Make your action prompt specific (e.g. NOT “after dinner”)
       • Try to match location/frequency/theme of your old habit and new one (e.g. NOT “I will sweep the garage after I brush my teeth”)
     • Context: something in your environment (e.g. sticky note, app badge)
   • Fogg believes that businesses over-use “context” prompts and under-use action prompts, and that this will change in the future.

5. Celebrate successes

   • When you celebrate effectively, you tap into the reward circuitry of your brain. By feeling good at the right moment, you cause your brain to reorganize and encode the sequence of behaviors you just performed.

   • Celebration reinforces your behaviors. Good feelings -> dopamine -> your brain says “I will remember what I just did to feel good”
   • Celebrating is fast, free, easy, and helps us be nice to ourselves.
   • Celebrations must happen immediately.
     • An incentive is not a celebration— the reward must occur either during the behavior or milliseconds afterward. Incentives are way too far into the future to give you that habit-forming dopamine.
   • Fogg says that celebration is “the most important skill for creating habits”
   • What does a celebration look like?
     • Think about if something really good just happened to you, like if you interview for your dream job and get the email that says you got the job, or if your team just barely wins a championship game. What do you do at that moment, physically and mentally?
   • Celebrating a habit, especially small ones, may sound stupid. I relate to “Linda” from this story in the book:

     • When Linda started doing Tiny Habits, she wrote off the celebration part of the method. Making things smaller and easier made sense to her pragmatic, analytical brain. But celebrating after every little thing? Not so much. That didn’t seem compelling or comfortable to her, so she carried on with the habits she had constructed… she wasn’t seeing the big changes that others were talking about.

     • If celebrating the small stuff is hard for you, the go-big-or-go-home mentality is probably sneaking up on you. Shut it down. It’s a trap.

     • Fogg says we need to lower our expectations; contrary to what society tells us, you don’t have to do something incredible to celebrate yourself.

   • 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.

• Remember to keep your behaviors small.

  • While small change might not be sexy, it is successful and sustainable. When it comes to most life changes that people want to make, big bold moves actually don’t work as well as small stealthy ones. Applying go big or go home to everything you do is a recipe for self-criticism and disappointment.

  • …think about how many of these tiny to-dos that you don’t want to do are clogging your brain every day… Taking the first step, no matter how small, can generate a sense of momentum that our brains love.

• I’ve often heard things like “you have to do a habit X times/days for it to stick” or something to that effect. Fogg directly addresses this:

  • How long does it take for habits to grow to their full expression? There is no universal answer. Any advice you hear about a habit taking twenty-one days or sixty days to fully form is not entirely accurate. There is no magic number of days.

Skills of Change

Change is a skill like any other skill; it can be learned and practiced. It’s not magic.

1. Behavior Crafting: selecting and adjusting the habits you want in your life
   • Pick habits that are naturally interesting to you, but stay flexible if they need to change.
2. Self-insight: knowing which habits will have meaning to you
   • Your new habits should align with the identity you’re trying to cultivate, and help you work towards one of your personal aspirations.
   • If you’re telling yourself “I should be doing this habit”, stop and decide— do you want to do it, or not?
3. Process
   • Be flexible and ready to change your approach if a habit isn’t working.
   • Don’t pressure yourself to do more than the tiniest version of your habit. But, if you want more, do more.
4. Context: redesigning your environment to make your habits easier to do
   • Remember that you’re not bound to tradition; if doing something non-traditional helps you achieve your habit, go for it.
5. Mindset: embracing a new identity
   • Celebrate your small successes
   • Be able to lower your expectations
   • Consider: what kind of person do you want to be? “I’m the kind of person who…”
   • Become the identity you want to be. Immerse yourself in that identity’s culture; do what they would do; talk like they would talk; look like they would look.

Breaking Bad Habits

• Fogg says the phrase “break a bad habit” isn’t great, because it suggests you can just break a habit in one step. Often times, it’s more like untangling a huge rope— one knot at a time.

• Reverse engineer your bad habit. Consider the overall bad habit, then consider what smaller habits contribute to the overall one. Pick the easiest, specific habit you can stop, and consider the “Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt” model.

• Adjusting the prompt

  • You can remove the prompt (prevent it from happening altogether), avoid the prompt (by changing your environment), or ignore the prompt (not a good strategy long-term because it relies on willpower).

• Adjusting ability

  • Try to adjust time, money, physical effort, mental effort, and routine to help prevent the bad habit.
  • E.g. move your phone far away from your bed to make it physically difficult to pick up in the morning.

• Adjusting motivation

  • Adjusting motivation is the worst option among the B=MAP model
  • You can use a “demotivator”, like an artificial punishment you set up for yourself if you continue the bad habit. Fogg advises against using demotivators, though, because they lead to negative self-image, and they just don’t work that well. Despite that, lots of people try this.

• Lastly, if adjusting B=MAP doesn’t work to break the habit, you probably need to lower your expectations, and try again.

  • E.g, “stop drinking” -> “stop drinking on weekdays”

Change Multiplies

• Fogg says that changing your habits is highly influential, and multiplies both within you and to those around you.
• Change leads to change: change in one area of your life can lead to positive feelings, and change in another.
• If you’re trying to support someone else through change, remember these 2 maxims: help people do what they already want to do, and help people feel successful.