How to Build Habits that Stick

You promise yourself you’ll do it this time.

You’ll wake up earlier.

You’ll make your bed.

You’ll meditate every day.

You’ll chip away at that Spanish app until every word sticks in your brain like they were always there.

For a few days, you’re right on track.

Your alarm buzzes into your dreams at 5am and you’re drinking coffee before dawn.

You learn how to make your bed with tight hospital corners.

You plow through three levels on DuoLingo and that Spanish quiz—surprise!—is a cakewalk. 

And then something happens. 

One day you snooze your alarm so many times that you’re skipping breakfast to make it to work.

Your bed goes unmade.

You ignore notifications from the language app that gently plead with you to return.

It’s not your fault that all those plans to build a better, healthier, more productive you slipped down into a deep crack, seemingly out of reach of your eager fingertips. 

As BJ Fogg, founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford and all around super smart dude, tells us, “for too many years, myths, misconceptions, and well-meaning but unscientific advice have set you up to fail.”

But there's good news: the habit building game isn’t hard. We just need to play differently.

Spiderman didn’t wake up with web-spraying fingertips and instantly know how to save the world.

Beyoncé had to push through some rocky choreography sessions and broken high notes before she could blast us away with “Single Ladies” and Lemonade.

Amelia Earhart had to learn how to be in the driver seat of a plane before she could be the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. 

A lot of work, research, effort, and process goes into the making of groundbreaking moments. 

You’re just as capable of being groundbreaking as your real world superheroes.

You just have to shove aside the internal critic who screams “you’re not capable,” “this isn’t right for you,” or “you need to stick to what you know” every time you try something new.

Side note to self: make silence internal critic the first new habit I build.)

Here’s how to build habits (the easy, “this’ll stick” way):

Instead of setting HUGE, hard-to-achieve goals that feel impossible to achieve (why am I trying to wake up at 5am every morning when I’m a happy and star-loving night owl??), shrink your habits into tiny, easy-to-accomplish tasks. 

Attach those shrinkified habits to an action or activity that is already a common, natural, or much-loved part of your day. 

Morning coffee is my ritual, which means that the fifteen minutes following my daily cup of joe is primetime for habit building.

If I start practicing a new habit—like getting a daily dose of yoga, dance, or movement in—right after I take my first sips of caffeine, it will help guarantee that I never miss a day.

Keeping track of your progress throughout your habit-building journey will help ward off that self critic.

Even if you miss a day or two on your long term path to becoming a yogi, remembering all the success you’ve had along the road—like that time when crow pose went from unattainable to easy peasy—will push you to celebrate the victories rather than catalog the setbacks. 

At the end of the day, we don't nurture our self love superpowers, supercharge our productivity, and become the person we know we can be by lunging for bigger habits. 

We do it by running confidently toward tiny ones.