Tiny Habits

https://tinyhabits.com/resources/

Introduction

For behavior change, they suggest:

Don’t judge yourself.
Break your goals down into small parts.
Reframe mistakes as data (as they say - 🌈“discoveries”🌈)

The introduction reads like they’re selling a self-help book… which isn’t entirely inaccurate.

Salesmanship aside, there’s some provocative ideas:

Information and being informed doesn’t necessarily create change.
There are 3 ways that reliably create change - epiphanies, changing our environment, or (titular drop) shifting habits in tiny ways.

In the tiny habits approach, they sell:

Small changes are fast to make. (EG - less than 30 seconds.)
There’s immediacy in starting their approach. (You have 30 seconds.)
- They’re subtle, but they suggest that you do what works for you, which is reasonable. I’m probably not going to think I’m going to have a fantastic time at the DMV, so convincing myself it will be less repulsive than the last round is more likely to stick.
Small changes are less risky.
The “you eat an elephant one bite at a time advice.” Small habits can lead eventually to large changes.
Tiny habits don’t rely on exerting (a lot of) willpower.
- They reframe failures as “design insights” and data rather than ya know. Fucking up.

They describe the tiny habit design as:

Anchor. An existing behavior to prompt you to do the thing.
Do the tiny thing.
Celebrate doing the tiny thing.

1 - The Elements of Behavior

BJ Fogg repackages operant conditioning through their model:

B = MAP

Behavior happens when (Motivation + Ability + Prompt) happen simultaneously

It’s intuitive. You can see the graph over at https://www.behaviormodel.org/. Take note of what prompts are effective and ineffective according to the chart.

Some takeaways:

There’s always some factor of motivation. This is difficult to change.
The ability to do something is also difficult to change. Choosing something easier easier moves on the ability axis, thus making it more likely it’ll pass the “action line” gate.
As behaviors repeat, they become “easier,” and are therefore more likely to go across the action line. (I think this is an oversimplification of automaticity, but I still need to read about that.)
Nothing happens without a prompt. Try to modify the prompt to encourage or discourage the behavior.
They do note that this requires tinkering. (Thinking about this model as a ritual, this prevents breaking the pattern of adjusting behavior when it fails.)

There’s a lot of stories in here. The book isn’t bad, and the point of it isn’t to be rigorous, but it’s design is almost impossible to disprove. It does seem handy for analysis though (going through MAP and seeing what can be adjusted.) Despite all this, I do like the spirit of the book, given the assumption the information here isn’t used for personal gain on other people.

2 - Motivation

Don’t get me wrong - I like this book so far, but the further I get in to this, the more it feels like a less horny The Brainwashing Book or a modern Don’t Shoot the Dog.

In regards to motivation being unreliable (fleeting,) this quote is pretty bomb:

Words like “rewards” and incentives” get thrown around with such regularity that most people think you can create whatever habits you want if you find the right carrot to dangle in front of yourself. This kind of thinking is understandable, but it also happens to be wrong.

- p42, Tiny Habits

Ah, the behaviorist roots are really showing here. Sweet. <3

Some psychologists talk about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. No offense to all those psychologists, but I’ve found this to be a weak distinction that is not very helpful in the real world.

- p43, Tiny Habits

Motivation from MAP comes from one of three places in PAC.

- Person - Something we already want. “Intrinsic motivation.” We want to look good.

- Action - A perceived consequence. (+P -P or +R or -R)

Context - A catch all. Social context, tiredness, drunkenness, satiety, whatever.

They mention that, while investing energy motivating yourself or others can be commendable, it’s rarely the right move.

If you want something, shoot for changing a behavior, not a goal (aspiration / outcome.)

Later, they remind us that we shouldn’t get inspiration on how to do something from rando’s on the internet, or guess (without planning,) or just do what worked for a friend. (I want to politely disagree and say these are fine places for inspiration, so long as you think them through.)

Who the hell is reading this anyway? Ah well…

Ah, they suggest mapping planned behaviors on an XY axis, called focus mapping.

X: Can you actually get yourself to do this?
Y: Low to High Impact

3- Ability

An effective way to start a habit is to make it absurdly, almost insultingly easy. The example they give is to literally just floss one tooth, and you get extra credit for doing more.

When evaluating ability - consider these aspects - both beforehand and after an attempt. Keeping with the ritual, it’s a process of gathering data, preventing failure.

Time Cost
Financial Cost
Physical effort and ability
Mental effort and ability
Does it fit in to your routine?

In order to make something easier:

Build skills / learn. (Watch some lessons.)
Get tools and resources. (Get a slow cooker.)
Make the behavior radically tiny. (Or, create a habit in service of creating later habits.) Be aware motivation fluctuates in their model, therefore, do not escalate difficulty early. It’s a fallback you can rely on.

Interestingly, they note that the perception of difficulty is evaluated the same way as actual difficulty. Perception is often a culprit of procrastination.

4 - Prompts

Proompting, for people I guess!

For creating prompts, they references their PAC model (person, action, and context.)

Person:

A person prompt is… uh. Prompting yourself.
Biological/interoceptive signs. (Hunger, BRB GGP.)
They’re generally unreliable if you want to control your prompts yourself.

Action:

These chain existing behaviors. They’re free, you don’t have to make them.
They call normal, repeated behaviors in your day-to-day anchors. (This isn’t to be confused with NLP anchors.)
Do something (immediately) after you do something else. It’s a sequence.

Context:

Environment and social cues. Notes, notifications, people.
You can overload yourself with too many notifications. A way around this is to write a few on a sticky note together.
Context prompts are good for one time events (like a date with an attractive monster,) but lean towards overload for repeatable, daily events. They might also go off when you’re in the middle of something else.
You can make these more useful, for you, by reducing the number of context prompts that you get and you make for yourself. Ya know, like… turning off notifications from apps or emails.

I’m not reading this for self-help reasons, but I can see the utility in the examples.

Good prompts should consider:

Physical location: (within your ability - you probably can’t do two pushups after you click your seatbelt in)
Frequency.
Theme. (Brushing your teeth blends well with flossing. Drinking coffee matches reading a paragraph or two in a book.)

Prompts may take experimentation to get right. (They encourage us to think of this as a process.)

They also discuss the idea of meanwhile habits. Or - doing something while you’re waiting for something, or listening to an audiobook on the way to work.

If you’re designing actions for others, they suggest analyzing when people usually do it, then integrate that into your prompt design.

I’m less sold on their idea of peral habits, which shift annoyances into something pleasant. EG - every time you hear a kid screaming outside, you relax your face. (My vibe isn’t selling it, it might work better for someone else, but the cognitive dissonance made me discard this idea immediately.)

The chapter ends with some inspiration for prompt design.

(I’m pausing on this book for a bit. I need to read up on predictive processing since I’d like to talk about it, but I want to know my shit beyond contextual inference.)