Now that you understand how to create more positive cues and cravings, the time to act is upon you. The law governing the third stage of habit formation is to make the response easy. But making a habit easy doesn’t mean doing easy things. Making habits easy means creating pathways for behavior that are low in friction and high in follow-through. So, what does it mean to act, and how are these pathways created?
Preparing for change is an effective way to trick yourself into thinking you’re forming better habits when all you’re really doing is procrastinating. You research the latest diet trends, seek out the best get-rich-quick scheme, or look for the most optimal side hustle. When you get trapped in the process of looking for the best solution, you never move beyond the act of looking to actual action.
Motion is what happens when you take time to plan, research, and design the process of changing. When working for you, motion helps you gather your thoughts and determine what your first steps will be to change your system. When working against you, motion gives you the illusion of making progress. You feel the forward movement of action without taking any of the risks of actually acting.
A persistent tendency to merely prepare for action becomes a bad habit over time. You notice a cue, crave the reward, and respond by planning the action. You feel productive, but motion doesn't lead to the result you really want.
Action, on the other hand, is actual forward motion. Without action, your goals will never be attained. You can rationalize planning as your desire to determine the perfect behavior for change, but a perfect system isn’t what creates good habits. Repetition is. Only by getting reps of a desired habit in will you be able to create behavior that becomes easy and sustainable.
The Varying Results of Motion and Action
Notice the difference between the two processes and the end result of each.
Outlining 30 ideas for a short story generates a list of ideas.
Choosing one idea and writing 30 words a day will generate a short story over time.
Reading blogs about weight loss and diet trends generates information about eating healthy.
Eating a salad for lunch three times a week generates a habit of eating more healthy foods.
You can plan endlessly and never get anywhere. The only way for results to be generated is by beginning the desired behavior, whether it’s perfectly planned or not.
The question you should ask when attempting behavior change is not how much time will it take, but how many times will it take. Hebb’s Law, named after the 1949 neuropsychologist Donald Hebbs, states that “neurons that fire together wire together.” The brain is a muscle, and like all muscles, when parts of it are used frequently, they enlarge, grow strong, and become more effective. If certain parts go unused, the effectiveness of those parts reduces and they eventually atrophy. For this reason, repetition is at the key to forming a habit.
Neuroscientists use the term “long-term potentiation” to describe the process of automating habits. In the brain, neural pathways are created when a new behavior begins. The more the brain recognizes a pattern of behavior, the deeper the pathways become. With each repetition, the pathway strengthens and the action becomes fine-tuned and automatic.
The goal of habit formation is to strengthen the connections in your brain to reach a state of automaticity, or the ability to perform an action without thinking about each step. Because every habit must go through this process, the frequency with which you perform a habit is more important than the length of time you perform it.
Your current habits were formed from hundreds to millions of repetitions. Whether the repetitions occurred over years, months, or days is less significant. To create new habits, you must practice with the same rate of frequency. Every attempt to perform the new habit gets you closer to the habit line of automaticity, when it becomes ingrained in the brain.
Since repetition is required for habit formation, making sure you get your reps in is vital. You will practice a behavior more often if it is considered easy. A behavior is deemed easy if the amount of effort required to perform it is low.
Energy is a precious commodity, and humans are hard-wired to conserve it. When provided with two choices that are similar in result and action, whichever requires the least amount of effort will win out. You are always looking to get the most value with the least amount of energy expended.
Many self-help books promote motivation as the main ingredient for sticking with any new habit. If you want to change bad enough, you will. But people are more likely to do what is convenient, even when motivated.
The more inconvenient a behavior is, the less likely you are to do it. Check your habit scorecard to see how many of your daily activities are driven by motivation and how many are driven by convenience.
Habits are really just obstacles to becoming the person you want to be. You want the identity, not the habit; therefore, the more convenient the habit, the more easily you can become the person you want to be. This is why you can’t trust motivation alone to start new behaviors.
There will always be days when you’re not motivated to act but you still need to get your behavior reps in. Only by reducing the effort required to act will you ensure you will still follow through. The amount of effort relates to the amount of friction existing between you and the act.
By removing the friction from habits, they will become easier to maintain, even when you’re unmotivated.
You already learned how to design your environment to create more obvious cues. Now, you will learn how to design your environment to make responding to those cues easier.
Businesses make millions of dollars by making their products accessible, thereby more habit forming.
You can create this same type of ease in your life by resetting your environment for success. Resetting the environment means cleaning up after your last action in a way that prepares you for future actions. Examples include placing the remote back on the TV stand when finished watching so you can find it easily or throwing trash away whenever you leave your car.
When things are in the right place, not only is finding them or maintaining the associated environment easier, but it also saves time and effort later, which can be transferred to other activities. A little effort toward organization in the beginning creates easy paths to good habits.
Inversion: Make It Difficult
Because you are wired to always look for the path of least resistance, it doesn’t take much friction to turn you off from a bad habit.
If you want to reduce how much television you watch, unplug the TV or take the batteries out of the remote. Watching television is not as easy if you have to go through several steps to make it happen.
If you want to focus more during work or avoid distractions while reading, leave your phone in a different room. The effort required to get up and seek out the phone is enough to keep you in place and focused on what you’re doing.
The cumulative effect of increasing friction in small ways is immense over time.
As previously stated, behaviors don’t happen in a vacuum. One automatic habit leads to another and so on. Think of each habit as a piece of railroad track. In succession, your pieces of track add up to a long railway. Depending on the first track you laid down, you could end up at the right destination or one far from where you wanted to go.
The first habit that sets the influence train in motion is called the decisive moment. These are small choices that snowball into future behavior. From this one decision, you create a set of options that your future self will have to choose from. You become limited in behavior because of the path your decisive moment laid out. In this way, your habits become the entry for behavior, not the end point.
It’s easier to stay on a course of linked actions than stop and shift directions at some point down the line. There are three ways to ensure your decisive moments create positive paths: the two-minute rule, commitment devices, and one-time actions.
One of the biggest ways you can fail at forming a new habit before you begin is by starting too big. If you break the system of a new habit down into smaller pieces, you will have more success in maintaining that habit. When the first step is easy, it’s more likely your decisive moment will be a positive one that snowballs into more positive behaviors in the near and distant future.
Committing to two minutes of activity is easier than trying to surmount the whole activity at once. Once you determine what actions are required in your system to reach your goal, rate them from easiest to hardest and commit to performing the easiest for two minutes.
A new habit should be easy, so do the easy part first. What follows might be difficult or challenging, but once momentum is built with the gateway habit, you are more likely to keep going.
Let’s say your end goal is to run a marathon. This goal encompasses the identity of someone who runs. The habit you wish to form is to run more often. You break your system into separate steps, but if you make the error of starting too big, your actions may look like the following:
Starting with a big step like running every day was hard to maintain because it required effort, and the moment that effort outweighed your motivation, you stopped. However, breaking down the system into two-minute increments will help you keep casting votes for your desired identity without a massive requirement of effort.
You may not be able to motivate yourself for a full run, but you can surely motivate yourself enough to change clothes. That may be as far as you get that day, but you’ve triggered the brain to start forming a pathway toward your future goal by getting into the habit of changing into jogging clothes after work. Over time, putting on workout clothes becomes a ritual, which serves as a cue for the larger response of going for a run. With continued repetition, the snowball effect will take hold, and you will continue taking the necessary steps until you are in shape for your marathon.
(Shortform note: You can go one step further by reducing the friction of Step 1. If you lay your running clothes out before leaving for work, the effort required to put them on is reduced.)
The point of the two-minute rule is not to only do the easiest thing. The point is to make a habit of showing up for your desired goal and identity. The biggest enemy to progress is the anticipation of work. The two-minute rule keeps you below the threshold of effort, which allows you to keep succeeding in accomplishing the task. As you generate enough days of performing the two-minute step, your identity as the person you want to be strengthens, which motivates you to keep moving forward, two minutes at a time.
If the two-minute rule seems gimmicky or foolish, try restricting your behaviors to two minutes, instead of allowing the two minutes to snowball into more.
Commitment devices are actions taken to ensure your decisive moments lead to the right future behavior.
A famous example of a commitment device is the one Victor Hugo used when faced with a deadline for his new novel. Having a year initially to complete his book, Hugo spent most of the time socializing or traveling out of the home. When his publisher threatened to cancel his contract if the book wasn’t submitted in the next six months, Hugo did something to ensure he would work on his book. He had his assistant lock all of his clothes in a chest and keep the key. The only thing he had to wear was a shawl. With no clothes, Hugo was forced to stay home. Six months later, he submitted the manuscript for The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
This type of commitment device is extreme, but it demonstrates how removing the elements that cause bad habits from your day sets you up for positive options.
When you take actions in the present that dictate desired actions in the future, you abide by your desired habits before you even attempt them. The key of a commitment device is to make not doing the good habit harder than it is to do it. This is the inverse of the third law—make bad habits impossible.
A one-time action is a significant effort made once that translates into making bad habits impossible and good ones inevitable. Some simple examples include:
An easy way to make significant, life-altering one-time decisions is with the use of technology. These days, you can do just about anything with technology, so why wouldn’t you use it to your advantage to help you achieve your goals?
When everything in your life that can be automated is, good habits require no energy at all, which frees up time for other activities. Use technology to enhance your lifestyle to keep you moving in the right direction and stop you from slipping into bad habits.
However, technology also makes life more convenient, which has the opposite effect of automating bad habits and falling victim to temptation.
Make sure technology is working to promote good behaviors and not make bad ones more visible and accessible.