How to Start a New Habit or Behavior
All meaningful changes in life begin with your habits and behavior.
When you think about who you are today and who you want to be in the future, the gap between those two selves comes down to what you do consistently. That means, to become the person you want to be, you have to start by doing the things the person you want to be would do.
But starting new habits isn’t easy.
While the human brain is hardwired to form habits, it also avoids unexpected change at all costs. And working against the brain’s natural tendencies makes behavior change extremely difficult. Instead, creating effective and lasting behavior changes is about understanding how the brain forms habits and following a strategy that works with it.
In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about how to start a new habit, including:
How to start a habit using the Motivation → Prompt → Habit → Reward Loop
How to start new habits and behavioral routines
How to grow and scale up established habits
How to layer in new habits over time
How to Use the Motivation → Prompt → Habit → Reward Loop to Change Your Behavior
A behavior will most likely happen when:
You’re highly motivated to do it
There’s a clear prompt that tells you to do it
It’s easy to do (the easier, the better)
You get some kind of “reward” for doing it
This is called the Motivation → Prompt → Habit → Reward Loop.
Below are the steps to form new habits and behavioral routines using this loop.
1. Choose a High-Motivation Habit
"The habits are what we can actually train at; the principles are what we’re trying to embody. … the idea is to burn the principles into the hundreds of manifestations of that principle [a habit] so that it becomes our way of life. … And all these little ways, you could say, don’t matter, but they add up to matter hugely. … Most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on, but if you don’t cultivate turning it on as a way of life in the little moments, and there are hundreds more little moments than big, then there’s no chance in the big moments." - Josh Waitzkin
The obvious first step is to pick a High-Motivation Habit.
A High-Motivation Habit is one that:
Improves your life or gets you something you want
Represents at least one of your core values
You could see yourself doing long-term
The Ups and Downs of Motivation
Your brain will always have the greatest incentive to maintain habits that improve your life, get you what you want, and are related to things you care about. That’s why picking a habit or behavior that satisfies these criteria is so important.
But motivation is like a wave that increases and decreases over time. At the start of a habit, you’ll have a ton of motivation. Then, when your motivation begins to wane, and it eventually will, focusing on a High-Motivation Habit makes it easier to stay persistent even when you lack motivation.
Start by making a list of habits in each of the criteria above and pick one that fits all three.
This is your High-Motivation Habit.
2. Make the Habit As Easy As Possible
One mistake people make when trying to start new habits is going “all out” right away.
For example, if someone is trying to build a meditation habit, they might try to meditate 20 minutes daily, even if they’ve never meditated a single minute before. Similarly, someone trying to build a running habit might challenge themselves to run a mile every day, even if they’ve never done any serious running before. These are examples of major behavior changes that are “too hard” to do.
Always remember that we’re more likely to follow through with a habit or behavior when it’s easy to do.
After you’ve picked your High-Motivation Habit, start out with the easiest version of it. The person trying to meditate can start meditating for one minute per day. The person trying to establish a running habit can run a quarter mile a few times a week.
Don’t worry if your initial version of your habit isn’t what you envisioned doing. The goal here is to create behavioral momentum and consistency. Over time, you can “scale up” your behavior however you’d like. More on that below.
3. Ease It Into Your Routine
Your daily life consists of patterns of behaviors you’re already doing, whether daily, weekly, or occasionally. These behaviors make up your routine.
Your routine is a crucial consideration when making changes to your behavior. For behavior to “stick” long term, it has to “fit” into your current routine. If a new behavior requires you to change your environment and routine completely, it’ll be too hard, and you’ll avoid doing it.
There’s no right or wrong way to do this — just find a specific place in your routine where you can start doing the new habit or behavior.
To generate some ideas, you can find specific activities you're already doing that you can link your new habit with. For example, if you're already stretching in the morning, you could meditate immediately afterward. If you're already reading in the morning, you could start writing right after you finish. If you're already eating breakfast in the morning, you could practice chess tactics right after.
The change should be so small that your brain has no aversion to it.
4. Create a Prompt to Remind Yourself to Do It
All habits need a prompt that “reminds” you to do it.
A prompt can be any stimulus you see, hear, or feel. Good prompts are the ones that are obvious and that you can’t miss when going through your day.
Some simple and effective prompt examples include:
Timers
Alarms
Phone reminders
Smartwatch alerts
Calendar reminders
Physical objects that obstruct something you need to access (stickies on top of your keyboard, for example)
As discussed in the section about your routine, the best prompts are sometimes the behaviors you’re already doing regularly. BJ Fogg calls these action prompts.
Start by picking a highly reliable behavior you’re already doing consistently — for example:
Writing
Reading
Showering
Making coffee
Brushing your teeth
Sitting down at your desk for the first time in the morning
To use an existing specific behavior as a prompt, anytime you do the existing behavior, do the easiest version of the new behavior immediately after.
5. Configure Your Rewards
The final part of the loop is the reward. A reward is anything after a behavior that increases the chances it will happen again in the future.
Rewards are the part of the loop that signals to the brain that the habit is good. And over time, getting those rewards after a new habit creates cravings for those rewards.
Establishing cravings for our habits is the key to keeping them going. The only way to achieve this is to teach the brain that the habit yields the rewards we want.
Of course, not all rewards are as effective as the others. Each person has their reasons for choosing a habit to pursue. These reasons provide us clues for promoting the craving for rewards.
When you work on a habit, there are two kinds of rewards you can use to keep it going:
Immediate External Rewards — These “rewards” occur right after doing the behavior or habit.
Delayed Intrinsic Rewards — These “rewards” occur over time but are highly reinforcing to us.
Immediate External Reinforcement
When you start working on a new habit, using simple rewards is okay to get yourself going. For example, you can get your favorite protein smoothie after each workout. At a certain point, you might even start craving that smoothie near the end of your training. Over time, your brain will learn the link between working out and a rewarding smoothie.
These are rewards at work.
At first, you should experiment with different immediate external rewards. The first one you pick may not be the best one, so keep trying different ones. Once you find a specific reward you crave after doing your habit, keep using it.
One crucial point is that immediate external rewards are effective for getting started. But over time, you must begin to crave the behavior for the right reasons. This is where delayed intrinsic rewards start to help us.
Delayed Intrinsic Rewards
As you keep your habit going, getting the real rewards you crave is critical.
In the exercise example, the real reason for starting the exercise habit wasn't a smoothie. Instead, it was your values (see Choose a High-Motivation Habit). You started working out to "be healthy" or "feel confident," and these are the real cravings you're after.
If you value being confident, find the opportunities to acknowledge that new confidence. You might get compliments from others or start seeing positive changes in the mirror. Start admitting that new confidence. Tell yourself, "I've been exercising, and because of that, I'm more confident."
To make lasting change, we need to access rewards that help us pursue our values. Immediate external rewards can keep a habit or behavior going if they relate to what we value. When choosing any reward for a habit, make it value-related. The critical question is: what am I actually craving? Then, make that the reward.
6. Celebrate Your Milestones
One effective way to access delayed intrinsic rewards is to celebrate milestones.
Picking milestones and celebrating when they're reached can be a powerful motivator. Over time, you’ll reach impressive milestones with you your habit. You might achieve a certain score, metric, or length of consistency.
Again, milestones shouldn't be arbitrary; they should be value-related. Using the exercise example, a vacation to the beach or a destination wedding could be a milestone. You might want to feel confident in a particular outfit at the beach or wear a specific outfit to a wedding. These can serve as motivating milestones that drive craving and consistency.
Milestones can also be metric-based. For example, you might value meditating for a certain number of days, weeks, or months. In other cases, you may work towards a different (but specific) score, measurement, or rating.
Tracking, reaching, and celebrating milestones are essential forms of delayed intrinsic reinforcement. They give you clear targets for the values that matter most. Identify what they are before you start your habit, and keep sight of them until you reach them.
7. Scale Your Habits and Add New Ones
“Experiencing one’s life as an expression of freedom is seen as the most positive and satisfying way to participate in this precious human adventure.” - Bruce Tift, Already Free
Pursuing your values through habits is one of the most powerful ways to impact your life. Applying the principles in this article will significantly increase your odds of “sticking” with your new habit. Over time, you'll add it to your routine, reach milestones, and become a whole different person.
Then, at some point in the future, two things will happen:
You will begin to feel that your current version of the habit has become too easy
You may decide to add a new habit to your routine
Scaling Up Habits
When starting your habit, you'll begin with the easiest version, but you won’t do that version forever.
Over time, as you build consistency, you'll find it will become too easy. At this point, it'll be time to create a new, more challenging version of your habit. This is how you scale up your habits.
If you think of the minimally viable version of your habit as "level one," what would "level two" look like? You can use the same strategies that you used to make your habit easier, but this time in reverse:
Can you do it for slightly more time?
Can you make it slightly more physically demanding?
Can you make it slightly more mentally or emotionally demanding?
Depending on your habit, you can use at least one of the questions above to start scaling up your habit. The key is to only go from "level one" to "level two." The goal is to create a new version just outside your current ability. Make sure your new habit is still “easy enough” to maintain your odds of consistency.
It's usually best to scale up only one aspect of your habit at a time. Scaling up the time, physical demands, and mental challenges all at the same time could be too much. Instead, focus on incremental improvements toward the ideal version of your habit.
Adding New Habits
Another natural progression of habit formation is adding a new habit to your life. It's usually best to focus on only forming 1-2 habits simultaneously. Focus on building consistency and reaching milestones for the initial habit(s) first. But once you've made meaningful progress, you'll find you're ready to add a new habit.
As you'll learn, there's no clear rule to knowing when you're ready to do this. You might've had a change of circumstances in your life, or you may start to feel ready for a new challenge. In either case, always start with your values and ask: "What one habit, if kept, would make the most impact in my life?" Then follow the steps you learned in this post to make it happen.
Summary of Steps
For future reference, here's a summary of the steps for habit formation:
Choose a high-motivation habit
Make the habit as easy as possible
Ease the new habit into your current routine
Create a prompt that reminds you to do the habit (ideally, an existing behavior)
Configure your rewards for your new habit (immediate and delayed)
Start doing your new habit
Celebrate milestones and intrinsic rewards
Scale up your habits and add new ones over time
Three Ways to Apply What You Just Learned
Download the LearnChangeDo Behavior Change Tool
Follow the Summary of Steps above and pick a High-Motivation Habit to start implementing into your routine
Teach someone else what you’ve learned about behavior change
Have a question about starting a new habit or behavioral routine? Send me a question at gabe@learnchangedo.org — I’d love to hear from you!