How To Change Habits? (The Answer May Surprise You)

Discover 6 practical techniques to change your habits and become the best version of yourself.

Habits: what are they? Habits are the small decisions and actions you make every day. According to Duke University researchers, habits account for about 40 percent of our daily behaviors.

Our life is basically the sum of our habits. Whether you are in good or poor physical shape is a consequence of your habits. Your level of happiness or unhappiness is related to your habits. Your success or failure is related to your habits. What you do repeatedly, what you devote time and thought to, ultimately shapes the person you are, the things you believe in and your personality. When you learn to transform your habits, you can transform your life.

But what can you do if you wish to improve? How can you develop new habits? There are 6 practical strategies that can make it easier to stick to new habits, enabling you to improve your health, your work and your life in general.

Contents

1. 6 Practical Strategies for Developing Winning Habits
2. 1. Start with Micro-Habits
3. 2. Trick yourself
4. 3. Minimize friction
5. 4. Track your Habits
6. 5. Stack your Habits
7. 6. Let go of the all-or-nothing mentality
8. The 3 Best Books on Habits

6 Practical Strategies for Developing Winning Habits

When struggling to build new habits, people often say “I wish I were more motivated” or “I wish I had your willpower.” This mindset is fallacious. Motivation often comes from external or situational cues, and expecting to be constantly motivated is unrealistic. Emotions and circumstances can vary, affecting our motivation. In addition, willpower is a skill that can be exhaustible. Research confirms that motivation is a fickle companion, rising and fading like a wave in perpetual motion. Stanford professor BJ Fogg has acutely called it the wave of motivation.

The real key to building winning habits, contrary to what is commonly thought, is not motivation, but creating systems and environments conducive to new habits. Designing a scenario that facilitates the implementation of desired actions reduces dependence on motivation and willpower.

Understanding how to shape positive habits without always having to draw on reserves of motivation is crucial to advancing in the sphere of health, happiness, and life more generally. Fortunately, science offers effective and accessible approaches to achieve this goal. Follow this guide with 6 practical strategies for developing winning and lasting habits.

1. Start with Micro-Habits

Solve the problem of motivation by starting with habits so easy that you don’t need motivation to practice them. Make them so easy that you can’t say no. Instead of starting with 50 push-ups a day, start with 5. Instead of trying to study a foreign language for an hour a day, start with five minutes a day. Instead of planning to go for a run at 7am, schedule a simple stretching exercise or a short walk as soon as you wake up.

This technique is effective because it is based on the principle of reducing resistance. Instead of being discouraged by challenging goals, the proposed approach makes the habits so accessible and easy to perform that it becomes difficult to say no. Moreover, once the practice becomes part of your daily routine, you can gradually increase the complexity or duration of the activity. This simple strategy can also lead to surprising results, as we will see in technique number 2.

2. Trick yourself

Instead of planning to tidy up the whole house, try telling yourself that you will spend a maximum of 10 minutes tidying up the bedroom. You can even set a timer. This is a simple gesture to break inertia. Once you get through the first few minutes, you will feel the change in energy. The secret is in the mental game of starting the habit. Try it and you will see how those 10 minutes spontaneously tend to turn into 15, then 20, and before you know it, you have devoted 30 minutes to cleaning the house.

What makes this method so effective? Momentum. This brief initial time investment breaks down psychological resistance to action. The feeling of progress and the change in energy generated during those first few minutes stimulate the desire to continue, turning a seemingly challenging task into a more manageable process.

That’s right: you have to trick yourself! Experiment with it yourself: do you want to incorporate exercise into your daily routine? Plan to do just one minute of physical activity, and watch what happens.

3. Minimize friction

As highlighted in the previous two points, the key is to minimize the initial friction. It is essential to minimize both the psychological and practical effort required to start a new habit. We have seen how to minimize friction on the psychological level: the habit should be so short or simple that it is not daunting. Now let us see how to minimize friction on the practical side as well.

Want to integrate English study into your daily routine? Put a direct link to Duolingo or your favorite app on the home screen of your cell phone. With just one click, you’ll be ready to start studying, even while on the bus, in the doctor’s waiting room, or in line at the supermarket. Likewise, place key tools for new habits at your fingertips. A book to read? Put it on your nightstand. Want to jog in the morning? Pack sweatpants and sneakers next to your bed the night before. While micro-habits remove psychological resistance, these tricks remove practical resistance, paving the way for adopting your new habits.

4. Track your Habits

A study conducted by the Dominican University of California showed that people who write down their goals and regularly monitor their progress are significantly more likely to achieve them. That’s why using a Habit Tracker is a powerful psychological and scientifically proven strategy for solidifying new habits.

What is a Habit Tracker? It is a tool that helps monitor and track daily habits. Usually, it is a simple table where you can record each day whether a specific habit has been completed. This tool provides a clear and immediate visualization of your progress in establishing new habits. You can use different types of Habit Trackers:

• Daily table: Create a table with habits to be tracked and mark each day with a tick when you have completed the activity.
• Specific apps: There are many dedicated apps that offer advanced habit tracking features. For example, you can use “Loop” or “Streaks“, apps that allow you to set goals, track habits, and receive reminder notifications on your phone.
• Journal: You can use a journal to track your habits. You can create a monthly page dedicated to your habits, highlighting each completed day.
• Calendar: You can use a calendar (a physical one or on your cell phone) to mark your habits. Add a simple “x” on each day you have completed your habit.

Why are these tools so effective? Our brain loves rewards, and seeing a wide array of ticks on a page can become a visual reward, stimulating the reward system and positively reinforcing the desired behavior.

You will be surprised at how much a simple mark on a calendar can transform your personal growth path.

In addition, apps help maintain regularity through reminders and notifications, while the desire to maintain a continuous sequence of successes (streaks) harnesses the brain’s propensity for challenges. These tools also help hold us accountable by confronting our commitments with ourselves and improving the likelihood of success in forming new habits. If you want to learn more about how the habit tracker can help you reach your goals and get ideas on what habits to track, read our article “Reach Your Goals in Less Than 1 Minute a Day with the Habit Tracker.”

5. Stack your Habits

To build new habits, it is crucial to define them in detail. It is not enough to say, “I want to start going to the gym.” Instead try, “I want to go to the gym every Tuesday at 6 p.m.” Clearly define the “when” and “where.” A concrete example is evening rituals: instead of setting yourself the generic goal of reading more, set yourself the specific goal of reading every night right before bedtime (when) in bed (where). Linking this activity to bedtime creates a logical and predictable sequence that encourages the acquisition of the new good habit.

A particularly effective way to build specific habits is Habit Stacking. This is an effective strategy for defining “when” and “where.” This technique uses the idea of linking new habits to existing behaviors already established in your daily routine. It is based on the idea that establishing a logical association between an existing habit and a new one makes it more likely that you will be successful in incorporating the latter into your life.

For example, if you wish to incorporate meditation practice into your day, you can combine it with an already established daily action, such as brushing your teeth in the morning. By deciding to devote 5 minutes to meditation immediately after brushing your teeth (when) sitting in your living room chair (where), you create a smooth and automatic sequence. Brushing your teeth becomes an anchor point that facilitates the adoption of the new habit.

6. Let go of the all-or-nothing mentality

Top performers make mistakes and stray from the right path just like everyone else. The difference is that they get back on track as quickly as possible. Studies show that skipping your good habit once has no measurable impact on your long-term progress.

Instead of trying to be perfect, abandon the black-or-white, all-or-nothing mentality. Embrace a more nuanced approach. The key is not absolute perfection, but resilience and the ability to get back up after every stumble. Learn to view obstacles as opportunities for growth, shaping your strategy based on the valuable lessons learned along the way.

This approach is successful because studies of human behavior indicate that a key determinant of success is long-term consistency, not occasional perfection. Assimilating new habits takes time and adaptability, and tolerance for missteps is crucial to maintaining motivation and consistency over the long term.

The 3 Best Books on Habits

In conclusion, I would like to share with you not only my favorite books on the science of habits for self-improvement, but also to emphasize how exciting the path of personal transformation is. Each page of these books is a compelling invitation to explore the potential that is released when we reshape our habits:

• Atomic Habits, James Clear
• The Slight Edge, Jeff Olson
• The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg

Remember: every small step toward changing your habits is a valuable investment, a seed you plant today to reap the rewards of well-being, success and fulfilment tomorrow. And if in addition to adopting new positive habits you want to get rid of bad habits, such as smoking or cell phone addiction, read our article titled “7 Practical Strategies to Free Yourself from Energy-Draining Habits.”

Now it’s your turn! Tell us your opinion in the comments below. Do you already use these strategies? Do you have other tricks that help you adopt and maintain positive new habits? What are your favorite books on personal growth? Share your resolutions on how you want to improve your life. And if this article has helped you, sign up to our newsletter for more exclusive tips.

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