Proven strategies to build new habits with ease
- Markus Over
- 9 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Key Takeaways
💡 Habits shape your life outcomes. From health to happiness to career success, much of what determines your future stems from your daily routines. Simple habits can snowball into major life improvements when maintained consistently.
🧠 Building habits isn’t about hitting a magic number of repetitions. While automaticity helps, habits rarely become effortless. Factors like environment, motivation, and habit complexity matter far more than repeating a behavior a set number of times.
🔍 Research reveals three proven strategies for habit success. Reflect on past habit wins to identify what worked (habit reflection), use reminders to stay on track, and create “mini-habits” that you can do even on low-energy days.
🔗 Habit chains and routines multiply your progress. Linking habits together (like stretching after brushing your teeth) or bundling them into routines reduces mental effort and strengthens consistency.
📱 Tools can simplify the process. Thought Saver, our free sister app, helps you build personalized routines, stack habits, set reminders, and even use spaced repetition to reinforce learning. It removes friction so you can focus on steady, meaningful improvement.
Have you ever wondered how you could be healthier, happier, or more successful in life? Most of us have, and often we're looking for some surprising insight that might change the course of our lives. Well, it turns out there is a very simple thing that is one of the biggest drivers of life outcomes of all kinds: our habits.
Take BJ Fogg, researcher at Stanford and author of the book Tiny Habits, who once installed a very simple habit: every time he went to the bathroom, he made sure to do two (or more, if he felt like it) push-ups - a habit small enough for him to have no good reason not to do it, and after sticking to it for six months, he saw a notable increase in fitness and averaged 60-80 push-ups per day.
This habit not only had a significant physical impact on him, it also kick-started his conviction that habits can be powerful tools for changing one's life.
In this article, we want to highlight different ways in which habits can be life-changing, while also taking the opportunity to introduce you to a sister project of ours: Thought Saver. This app has existed for a few years but recently underwent a significant overhaul to focus on helping you form healthy daily habits that are highly customized to your own situation. What once started out as a ‘spaced repetition’ app has now turned into a powerful habit tracking and routine-building system.
It can help you make deliberate changes to your habits - and life - and is completely free. It will also help you choose the right daily actions to support your goals and life challenges.
Perhaps you already have an interest in cultivating some specific healthy habits. If not, it could help to pick a few to focus on as you read this article; what follows might give you ideas for how to approach them.
Based on our prior research, some of the most popular habits that people are interested in building into their daily lives are:
Reading books
Stretching (e.g., focusing on an area of poor mobility or recurrent tightness)
Practicing a skill (e.g., a foreign language or computer programming, or cooking)
Drinking more water
Exercising
Learning about a topic that matters to you
Cooking and eating healthy food
Feel free to choose one of these, or any other one you can think of, and try to envision what your life could look like a year from now if you succeed in establishing it as a daily habit, starting today. Thought Saver also has a wide range of healthy daily habits you can choose from during the onboard process, and it will even suggest specific ones to you based on your life situation and goals.
How to Successfully Build a New Habit
Habits are powerful things. Imagine you could just decide to have a new habit: this would allow you to lock in some enormous long-term benefits. But in practice, it's usually not so easy - building a new habit often takes consistent effort over long stretches of time, and many people fail at the attempt.
Just think of New Year's resolutions: it's very common to be initially excited about them, only to lose interest before even making it through January. This can even lead to learned helplessness and a conviction that building new habits isn't feasible. While it's true that forming habits can be challenging, if you approach the process in the right way, it can be much easier. So, what do different approaches to building habits look like? And which ones work best?
How long does it actually take to form a habit?
It's often claimed that, to build a habit, you just need to repeat the behavior some number of times. Whether that's 25 times or 50 times or some other number, people like to claim that there is a particular number of repetitions it takes to install a habit successfully. At that point, the assumption goes, continuing no longer requires conscious self-regulation because getting started happens with little friction - there’s no inner debate or effortful choosing each time. But is this really true?
In his best-selling book Atomic Habits, author James Clear proposes a simple model for thinking about habit formation, which he calls the Habit Loop (which builds on the ideas in Charles Duhigg's 2012 book The Power of Habit). This particular four-step framework hasn't itself been experimentally validated, but it is derived from well-established psychological and neuroscientific findings and can serve well as a helpful metaphor or heuristic:
For some habits – such as brushing our teeth in the evening or taking off our shoes when coming home – this is probably a good representation of what's happening. Getting home after a day at work, we don't have to think about taking off our shoes; it's an automatic action usually triggered immediately after passing through the door. It's so effortless that we don't even need to think about it. If you have a no-shoes home, have you ever forgotten to take off your shoes after getting home? Probably not, it just happens automatically.
Reaching such a level of automaticity with any desirable habit may indeed be great! However, there are some issues with this:
For some behaviors, it's not very realistic to reach this fully automated state at all, as they can be quite involved and require many steps. Just take going to the gym regularly: for most people, this will always include a conscious decision and some effort (you won't just suddenly find yourself at the gym without having ever consciously thought about going there).
Even when it is realistic, it's unlikely that there is a single meaningful threshold for fully installing a habit. The necessary repetitions surely depend on many factors like the person, the habit itself, or the concrete implementation, as prior research suggests (e.g. Singh et al, 2024, or Milkman et al, 2023).
Even for a habit that happens mostly automatically, it can still be the case that slight shifts in the environment can lastingly disrupt that habit, as it still depends on a reliable trigger.
Case in point, Markus (one of the authors of this article) once had a highly persistent daily habit of using a spaced repetition app. He had done so for years, every morning, first thing after waking up. Then, at one point, he enrolled in an online course that required him to get up very early in the morning for a month. This not only disrupted his spaced repetition habit - it also took him an entire three weeks to even notice this had happened! It was one of the most persistent habits he had had up to that point, and yet a minor change to his daily schedule was sufficient to derail this habit completely.
That being said, re-establishing that habit was comparatively easy, as all it took was to find a more reliable trigger. Of course, that’s just one case, but it highlights something that appears to fit the broader pattern reported in the literature: re-establishing a positive habit you've had in the past can be easier and faster than building an entirely new one, and hence could be a good starting point for sustained behavior change.
So, as useful as automatic positive behaviors are, they're not a magic bullet, and we should make sure to consolidate our behavior in other ways. But what else can we do?
Proven Strategies
At Clearer Thinking, we've run large studies on habit formation, such as a study on our Daily Ritual tool, a large randomized controlled trial investigating 22 different habit-forming techniques, and a study on happiness-boosting habits.
Our research revealed that some of the most effective habit-building approaches are:
Habit reflection: Look back on a previous successful habit change, identify what factors and techniques led to your success, and then devise a way to implement those same factors and techniques for the current habit you want to form.
Reminders: At home (or your workplace, or your phone, or wherever you want to trigger the habit), place some easy-to-notice reminders, so you don't forget about the habit.
Mini-Habit: Create a minimal version of your habit to fall back on when time or energy is limited.
We also found that motivation is one of the best predictors for success in installing a new habit, so it's likely a good idea to start out focusing on the beneficial habits that you're most excited about.
At the same time, motivation often fades away over time. So rather than relying on motivation alone, it's always wise to plan ahead for tougher days when you may not feel like doing your habit. This is where both habit reflection and mini-habits can be really helpful.
If you want to form new healthy habits more easily, our sister project, Thought Saver may help on multiple fronts: it provides dozens of habits to choose from that get automatically recommended based on your specific situation (and of course, you can also define your own). It also makes it easy to set custom recurring reminders suited perfectly to your needs.
Habit Chains and Routines
Another useful strategy can be to link habits together: Rather than maintaining multiple habits in isolation, you can combine them so that the conclusion of one habit leads directly to the next one.
For instance, a common chain of small habits done in the evening could look like this:
Another way to connect habits is through temptation bundling, a concept studied by Katherine Milkman and colleagues, which involves pairing something enjoyable with something beneficial. An example would be to only watch your favorite TV show while exercising on a stationary bike:
Such habit chains have a significant advantage: they free you from having to make decisions about when and if you carry out your habit. You just follow the predefined steps in the usual order. It's usually much easier to go through such a chain of habits than to keep five different, separate habits in mind.
You can turn these habit chains into entire routines, allowing you to focus on that one "container habit." By getting used to your routine, you can then incorporate any number of individual habits you want to accomplish daily. For some people, a morning routine works best. Others have an after-work wind-down routine or an evening routine.
Referring back to that point about automaticity of habits, the magic of routines lies in the fact that your routine as a whole can become automatic fairly easily. If you have a reliable trigger to start your routine, it can then support any number of habits.
Routines are another use case of Thought Saver: the app allows you to build routines with ease by stacking any number of habits together and deciding if and when to get reminded about them. Your routine can even be different for different days of the week, allowing you to combine daily habits with other cadences. With Thought Saver handling the mental load, you're free to focus on what really matters, knowing the app will keep you on track.
On top of helping you build habits into a daily routine, Thought Saver even comes with a spaced repetition system to help you memorize useful facts. If learning new things and remembering them long-term is one of the habits you're interested in, the app can seamlessly integrate this into your daily routine and even provides a variety of pre-built flashcard decks.
Build a New Habit Today
Building a new habit can be among the most impactful actions you can take: a one-time effort that, when applied carefully, can enable you to change your behavior for years to come. In this article, we've discussed several relevant insights:
Initial motivation is a reliable predictor of successfully building a new habit
Three proven strategies for installing new habits:
Using carefully set-up reminders to not forget about a habit
Engaging in habit reflection to identify strategies that tend to work best for you personally and figuring out how to apply them in the current situation
Preparing for bad days by having mini habits - versions of your habits that are so quick and easy that there are no excuses not to do them, allowing you to consistently do the habit even when you have little time or energy
Automaticity of your habits is helpful, but not always reliable or fully achievable
Habit chaining and routines enable you to bundle many small habits together, which can greatly reduce cognitive load
Whether you're looking to implement a new habit or an entire routine, and whether you use Thought Saver or any other system, we hope this overview has given you new ideas for making lasting, positive changes to your life.