(2018-10-30) Chin A Review Of Bj Foggs Tiny Habits

Cedric Chin: A Review of BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits. Yesterday, I published a summary of Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, arguing that a self-interested reader would do better to read my summary and then go sign up for BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits course.

I completed Fogg’s course at the end of last week. I walked away with three new habits, a sense of wonder at his approach, and a renewed appreciation for the differences between reading a book about practice and actually putting those ideas into practice.

Fogg’s approach in Tiny Habits is to stake habit formation to another existing behaviour. You’ll remember from my summary of Duhigg’s book that a habit consists of three elements:
A trigger, or cue.
A routine.
A reward.

there are only five types of triggers in the habit-formation literature: location, time, emotional state, other people, and immediately preceding action.

Fogg’s approach uses this last trigger type as the basis of its habit formation.

Fogg suggests the tiny habit recipe “After I brush, I will floss one tooth.” You then make a commitment to perform this habit over the course of five days — which is the length of the free course.

You are asked to choose three habit recipes for the duration of the week

All three habits have outlasted the program thus far

The great thing about Fogg’s course, however, is that he gives you tools to debug habits that don’t seem to take

Fogg’s method works for a number of ingenious reasons.

First, his course — while free — requires active commitment from the participant. You have to sign up for a slot a few weeks in advance, and are warned the Sunday before the course starts to enter your habit recipes into the course website — or risk losing the slot!

Second, the course links you up with a Tiny Habits coach.

I found the human touch to be remarkably effective at keeping me going

Fogg’s method for habit formation works because it takes willpower out of the equation. One of the first lessons you learn is that your proposed routine needs to be tiny

If an action is tiny, it doesn’t take any effort to do, so you experience no mental pushback when it’s time to actually start doing the habit

once you start doing the first, tiny action, the rest of the desired behaviour unrolls naturally

The second reason Fogg’s method works is because he places a huge emphasis on celebrating.

The last part of the cue-routine-reward habit loop is the reward, and Fogg’s answer to this solution is to create a ridiculously over-the-top physical action.

he explained that every habit loop needs to be followed by a ridiculous over-the-top physical expression of celebration. His reasoning: you need to feel happy, and the easiest way to trick your brain into “OMG I’VE WON” mode is to do something physical that affects you emotionally.

I considered Fogg’s advice, and eventually chose to pump both my fists into the air and say “YES!” as my celebratory technique. And exactly as Fogg predicted — I felt completely ridiculous

But it worked!
To my surprise, the next day, I felt a tickle at the back of my head when I was about to start work without doing my post-coffee deep breathing exercise

Fogg’s method offers a few strategies for debugging this habit:

• Change the trigger
• Simplify the action

Celebrate when I’ve picked up the kindle but not read anything