A Research-Based Framework For Forming Habits That Actually Stick
- Spencer Greenberg
- 54 minutes ago
- 13 min read
Short of time? Read the key takeaways.
🔄 A lot of your actions are habitual. Studies suggest that perhaps as much as two-thirds of actions are performed out of habit. Because so much of daily behavior runs on autopilot, forming positive habits is one of the highest-leverage ways to improve your life and move toward your goals.
🎯 Choose a habit you’re genuinely motivated to build or replace. In our research, we found that feeling highly motivated when beginning habit formation is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone will successfully stick to a new habit.
⏰ Make your habit automatic by tying it to a specific trigger. Clearly defined triggers (like a time, event, or existing habit) remove the need for decision-making and make the behavior much easier to execute consistently.
🧩 There are techniques that can help make your habits automatic. For example:
Mini-habits. Having a simplified backup version of your habit to perform when time or energy runs short.
Reflect on past successes. Thinking about when you've successfully developed a habit in the past and what made that a success, then applying those lessons to your new habit.
Focusing on meaningful benefits. Reflecting on why the habit matters helps sustain motivation when it naturally declines.
Setting up memory aids and motivation boosters.
⚡ Habit strength depends on repetitions, not days. The popular claim that habits form in 21 days is not supported by empirical evidence. What actually matters is how many times you perform the habit in response to its trigger, making consistency more important than duration.
🚀 Consistency early on is especially critical for habit formation. The initial phase is a sensitive period, so making a strong effort not to miss triggers early can greatly accelerate habit development.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Will Durant, summarizing Aristotle’s ideas.
A lot of what you do depends on your habits. Studies suggest that roughly two‑thirds of your time could be spent performing actions that are at least partly driven by habit. Thus, if you have positive habits, they can help you spend a lot of time doing things that are good for you or take you towards the life you want, whereas if you have negative habits, you’ll spend a lot of time doing things that are bad for you or make it harder to achieve your goals. This means that one of the highest leverage points for improving your life may be to rethink your habits.
We recently ran a workshop on Forming Habits that Stick, which taught participants a process for selecting a habit they wanted to form and making a plan for developing it. This article walks you through that process, including recommendations based on the studies we've conducted testing different habit formation techniques. By the end of the article, you’ll have the tools to help you (a) pick a new habit that you want to form and (b) make a plan that improves your chances of sticking to that habit in the long term.
If you’d rather watch the video recording of this workshop, you can do so here.
And if you’d like access to all recordings of past events, we hope you’ll consider becoming a Clearer Thinking Plus member, here.
What is a habit?
The technical definition of a habit is simply this: A habit is a behavior that's automatic and occurs in response to a trigger.
Suppose that every time you go into your kitchen, you go grab a snack. The trigger would be going into your kitchen, and then the habit would be going to the cupboard and getting a snack. The key is that it's automatic. You're not thinking, "Oh, should I have a snack or not?" You're just immediately going into the cupboard and trying to get a snack.
There's also a closely related concept that's often confused with habit: routine. A routine is simply a behavior that you do predictably but knowingly. (For example, at a particular time or place, but you realize when you're doing it.)
Unlike a true habit, a routine is not kicked off automatically. You have to think about it. For example, perhaps every Sunday morning you read the New York Times, but instead of being truly automatic, it’s always a conscious decision that involves thinking something along the lines of “Oh, do I want to read the newspaper today?” Even though you always decide to do it, the fact that it’s a conscious (not automatic) decision means it’s a routine, not a habit.
In this article, we're going to use the word ‘habit’ a little bit loosely to talk about both technical habits that are kicked off subconsciously and routines that you do regularly. That’s because, from the point of view of improving your life, it doesn't really matter whether it's fully subconscious or not. As long as you're engaging in positive behaviors regularly, that's a win for you.
Step 1: Pick a habit
Start by thinking of a habit that you want to create or replace today, while you read this article. This could either be:
Creating a new positive habit
Getting rid of an existing negative habit by replacing it with a new one
It’s important that you pick something that you're motivated to do. We at Clearer Thinking have done a lot of research on habit formation, and one of the strongest predictors we found of people succeeding at their habit was feeling very motivated at the beginning of the process. This makes sense because forming a new habit is hard. It's work. So, try to answer the question “What's a habit that I really want to form or replace?”
Here are some examples of positive new habits:
Go running every morning
Read every night before sleeping
Stretch for five minutes after waking up
Do two minutes of deep breathing before starting work
Take three deep breaths before responding, whenever you notice yourself getting angry
Practice a foreign language for five minutes a day
Greet people in a warm and friendly way, which communicates that I like them
Here are some examples of replacing negative habits with positive ones:
Replace doomscrolling in bed with reading at least ten pages of a book
Replace procrastinating on tasks with doing just one minute of the task
Replace impulse online purchases with adding the potential purchase to a list and waiting 24 hours before buying
Replace ordering expensive or unhealthy food at lunch time with eating a pre-prepared lunch instead
To get the most out of this article, we suggest you take a moment (right now) to think of a habit you're motivated to create or replace. Ideally, don't just think it in your head; actually write it down somewhere, so that you have a record of what you produced while reading this article, which will help you stick to your habit.
Step 2: Identify triggers
So, now that you have identified a habit you want to create or replace, the next step is about triggers.
If you want to create a new habit
It's really important that you pick very specific triggers, so you know exactly when you’re supposed to perform your prospective habit. Here are some examples:
Time-based triggers. E.g., “At 9:00am every weekday, I decide on three priorities for the day”
Event-based triggers. E.g., “When I get into bed to sleep, I read at least five pages of a book”
Habit-based triggers. E.g., “After I brush my teeth, I do at least 5 push-ups”
Internal triggers. E.g., “When I feel extreme frustration, I do some breath work”
If you're using an event-based trigger, make sure it's an event that happens regularly on its own. Things like “my partner gets home from work” or “when I get into bed to sleep” are good triggers because they are reliably going to happen (well, at least so long as you have a partner who goes out to work).
Habit-based triggers can be leveraged using a technique called ‘habit stacking’. The idea is that, if you already have a strong habit you do every single day, you can attach your new, desired habit to the end of it. Brushing teeth or using the bathroom are common examples, because they’re things that most people already do habitually and regularly. Your new habit can simply be tacked onto the end so that the end of an existing habit becomes the trigger for the new habit.
In the same place that you wrote down the habit you want to form, write down your trigger by filling in the square brackets in this sentence:
“Whenever [trigger], I will [new habit].”
If you want to replace a negative habit
In the case of replacing a negative habit, you're not choosing the trigger; the trigger is already chosen for you. Your job is to figure out what it is. Ask yourself, “What is the current trigger that's already occurring, which initiates the behavior that I want to stop?” Examples include:
Event-based triggers. E.g., “Whenever I sit down on the couch, I start scrolling on my phone”
Internal triggers. E.g., “Whenever I feel the urge to check social media, I end up checking it and getting distracted from more important tasks.”
Once you have identified what the current triggers are, you then want to think about creating a new habit to replace the old one. Ask yourself, "What do I want to do instead?" For example, you could turn each of the bad habit triggers above into:
“Whenever I sit down on the couch, I will pick up a book, instead of scrolling on my phone”
“Whenever I feel the urge to check social media, I will send a friend a text or DM instead of checking it and getting distracted.”
Most negative habits help us in some way or address some need, even though overall they are bad for us. It's important that the habit you're replacing a bad habit with addresses some of the needs that the bad habit fulfills. For instance, if addictive scrolling on social media is something you do when you're stressed as a way to relax, ideally, the more positive habit you replace it with would also be something that is relaxing. This is important because if your new habit doesn't address the needs of the negative habit, then your need won't be satiated by the new habit, which may be one cause of continuing to feel an impulse to do the negative habit.
Now, in the same place that you wrote down the negative habit that you want to replace, write down your trigger by filling in the square brackets in this sentence:
“Whenever [trigger], I will [new habit], instead of [old habit].”
Step 3: Increase your motivation
The rest of the steps in this article involve techniques that we tested directly in two large randomized controlled trials (n=477 and n=404). We tested 22 different techniques for forming habits and found that the vast majority have no effects at all. This article is based on the few techniques that appeared to work the best according to our data.
We’ve already said that it's important to choose a habit you feel motivated to perform. Fortunately, there's actually a technique that we found can help with your habit motivation.
First, write down three benefits that you could get if you stick to this habit.
Then pick which of those three benefits is most important to you.
Spend a few moments reflecting on the importance of that benefit.
We suggest you take a moment to do this now.
Benefits might include things like: more energy, more health, increased focus, better relationships, better job prospects, peace of mind, or anything else!
There's a good chance that, at some point, you're going to start feeling less motivated to perform the habit you’ve picked today. Something you can do when that happens is go back to that list of benefits and spend some more time reflecting on their importance to you. You could even keep a copy of that list of benefits somewhere that is likely to be accessible or in view when you perform your habit.
Other things you can do include:
If your email client can schedule emails in advance, you can schedule an email to yourself for two or three weeks into the future, reminding yourself of those benefits.
If you are very socially motivated (e.g., you’re the sort of person such that, if you know someone is expecting you to do something, then there’s an increased chance you’ll do it), you can go to an important person in your life and say, "Hey, I'm trying to form this habit. Will you check back in 3 days to see how I'm doing?" or "Hey, you know, when we see each other next week, could you ask me about how well I'm sticking to this habit?"
Step 4: Have a simple backup
Complexity can also matter. More complex habits can take longer to form and take up more time. This leads us to the next technique that we studied and found to be useful: developing mini-habits.
The idea is that, unless your habit is very simple and quick to perform (e.g., drink a glass of water), there are going to be some days when you just don't have time or energy to perform it. For instance, imagine you’re trying to go for a run every morning, but one morning you’re inundated with other things in your schedule, and you just don't have time to do the run. What do you do?
Well, the standard response to this kind of situation is to fail to perform the habit. Unfortunately, this weakens the habit. It makes it more likely that you're going to miss it the next day, and the day after that, and so on. So, the idea behind the mini-habit is simple: when you can't perform the habit, you're going to do something else instead – something that's reminiscent of the habit, to at least help keep it going, so that you don't lose the association between the trigger and your desired behavior.
In the case of the daily running example above, a mini version could be any short and simple cardio exercise, such as running on the spot for a minute.
This applies whether you’re trying to create a new habit or replace a bad one. In the case that you’re trying to replace a bad habit, the new habit you're trying to replace it with might be complex or demanding. If so, make sure you have a mini version available for times when the full replacement habit isn’t possible or feels too much.
You might think that, if people have a simple version of their habit they can do instead, then their behavior will just degenerate into doing that mini version as standard. In our research, we found that not to be the case. We found that people actually end up more satisfied with their habit, and stick with it better when they have the option to replace it with the mini version, because doing the mini version is much better for the habit than not doing it at all.
We suggest you now take a moment to continue developing your habit plan by constructing a tiny version of the habit you wrote down earlier, which you can do on days when you just can't hit the habit in full.
Step 5: Make it memorable
Silly as it may seem, sometimes we don't perform a habit because we just simply forget. It’s so easy to forget habits we want to establish when we're juggling all kinds of other things in our lives. So, this next step is to give yourself memory aids. Here are some suggestions:
Write the habit you want to form on a piece of paper and stick it somewhere you’re going to see every day. For example, on your computer, your office door, or bathroom mirror. In our study, we found that this improved people’s ability to stick to their habits.
Put a repeating event in your calendar.
Add a repeating alarm on your phone.
Schedule emails to yourself
You could also use an app. We have actually developed a completely free app that can help you remember your habits, called Thoughtsaver. You can use it as an app on your phone, but it also works on a computer or tablet. Not only that, but it can help you to design habits that are healthy for you, and it also does streak counting (where you can see how many consecutive days you've done your habit), which can improve motivation.
Step 6: Reflection
This last step involves probably the most interesting finding from our study. There was one technique that really stood out above all the others, and it's a technique we call “habit reflection”. It's a little bit more involved than the other steps, but it should only take a few minutes. Here’s how it works.
First: Write down a time when you succeeded at forming a habit or breaking a habit (depending on what you're aiming to do now). It might be a habit you no longer engage in - as long as you feel you formed (or broke) it successfully at some point, you can use it here.
Second: Write a description of what you did that helped you with that habit. Maybe you told a friend about it, or maybe you made sure to do it at the same time every day. Whatever it is, just think about what you did that helped you and write that down.
Third: Now write down how you can apply what you learned from the last habit that succeeded to this new habit you're trying to form now.
This is a kind of self-adapting technique because it's really about giving you time to reflect on what works for you and then making a plan to apply those insights in this new case.
What to do next
Before we wrap up, we want to address a common question: How long does it take to form a habit? A popular claim that we’ve debunked before is that it takes 21 days. Despite the fact that this claim has no empirical evidence supporting it, it has somehow stuck in the public consciousness.
So, how long does it actually take to form a new habit? The answer is that it's highly variable and it's more useful to stop thinking in terms of days and start thinking in terms of the number of times you perform the habit. Every time you see the trigger and you perform the habit, that helps reinforce it. This means that, if it's a habit you're going to do many times a day, you could have many reinforcements in a single day and you could form the habit very quickly. However, if it's a habit that only comes up once a week, it could take you many months to develop the automaticity of a habit or ease of a routine.
How quickly you develop your habit also depends on consistency. You really want to try to never miss a day or never miss a trigger at the beginning of the process, because the beginning is a sort of critical period for forming the habit. For this reason, we suggest putting extra effort into never missing a trigger early in your process.
You should now have a plan written down that includes:
Your desired habit (whether new or replacing an old one)
The trigger for your habit
A list of three motivating benefits (with one that you’ve identified as most important)
A mini-habit that you can perform on occasions when the full habit is impossible or overwhelming
A method of applying what you learned from another (successful) habit to this one
If you are missing any of those components, we suggest you start by filling them in. Then consider which of our other tips you’d like to implement:
For motivation:
Schedule an email to yourself for two or three weeks into the future, reminding yourself of the benefits of your habit.
Say to an important person in your life, "Hey, I'm trying to form this habit. Will you check back in 3 days to see how I'm doing?" or "Hey, you know, when we see each other next week, could you ask me about how well I'm sticking to this habit?"
For memory:
Write the habit you want to form on a piece of paper and stick it somewhere you’re going to see every day. For example, on your computer, your office door, or bathroom mirror
Put a repeating event in your calendar
Add a repeating alarm on your phone.
Schedule emails to yourself
Try our free app, Thoughtsaver
Then, all there’s left to do is go out there and perform your habit! You’ve got this.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider signing up for access to all recordings of past workshops by becoming a Clearer Thinking Plus member, here.
And if you’d like to try the free Habit Building tool we made, based on our habit research, you can do so here: