Because you live in an age that has monetized your attention (hi TikTok, Instagram, other blinky shiny things we get lost in), you shouldn’t be hard on yourself if you’ve developed some habits that you’d … like to change.
Super understandable.
And to do so, it’s useful to understand some of how your mind works and how to develop new habits that you like even better than the old ones.
So we’re going to talk through:
Some myth vs reality with habit formation
A bit about how your mind works
A great technique for building better habits
If you follow the steps in this post, you’re pretty likely to build better habits. (These are techniques that have worked for us, and for many other people.)
And a heads up that if you skip down to the "How to build a (better) habit" part without reading the context before it, this probably won’t work that well for you. (Also, understanding how your mind works is just fun.)
How long does it take to form a habit? Myth vs Reality
One of the most common myths we’ve seen is the “21 day” myth—the claim that it takes 21 days to instill a new habit in yourself.
Not true, actually. (Would be nice though.)
There are various studies on this, with slightly different takeaways, but they generally all demonstrate that the 21 day myth is junk.
For example, a 2021 study found that it can take about 59-70 days to create a reliable habit.
Which is fairly similar to another study that found it takes on average a bit over 2 months, but possibly much longer or shorter depending on the habit you’re trying to establish. (Also useful to note: “Missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process.”)
Or another that found that for trying to improve health outcomes by changing lifestyle habits, it can take about 10 weeks.
Key takeaways here: Treat this as a process, and don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t perfect and miss a day—this will take some time, so just jump back on board. Below, we’ll talk through how to hack your brain a bit to make the step-by-step-day-at-a-time easier.
A bit about your mind: System 1 and System 2
Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work together led to (among many other things, like a Nobel Prize) Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which we’d highly recommend reading, but we’ll give you some of the relevant essentials here:
Your mind has two very different types or systems of thinking, what Kahneman (and others before him) calls System 1 and System 2.
System 1 is…
Near-instantaneous
Automatic
Intuitive
Emotional
Largely effortless
Driven by instinct
Shaped by experience
Essentially, your mind has built models of how it thinks the world works (heads up: it can—hopefully this is obvious—be wrong), and it uses those models for decision-making shortcuts.
Examples of System 1 Thinking:
Being able to tell from your friend’s voice that they’re sad
Riding a bike or tying your shoes
Understanding that one object is farther away than another
Deciding to invest in Tesla because the cars seem cool
System 2 is…
Logical
Conscious
Effortful
Slow(er)
Essentially, System 2 thinking is what allows you to multiply 234 x 579, or assess the validity of a syllogism (though System 1 beliefs and biases tend to impact our decision making even when we think we’re being purely rational).
Examples of System 2 Thinking:
Figuring out how much to tip a waiter
Mapping out several moves ahead in chess
Questioning System 1’s intuitions
Deciding to invest in Tesla (or maybe not to invest) because you’ve actually analyzed their P/E ratio, potential growth, etc.
Some key things to understand here:
Your mind is pretty good at building rough models of the world, given enough experience. Your System 1 is basically always running, and is why you can do things that seem like multitasking, like, say, singing along to a song you know well while driving. (A big heads up though: your brain cannot truly multitask with things that take actual mental effort, like trying to do long division while listening to a complex conversation or TED Talk, and people who try to multitask actually do those things worse than if they would just do them separately. System 2 gets overloaded quickly and easily.)
System 1 helps you get through the world by building tons of what friends of ours call trigger-action patterns—automatic, essentially thoughtless actions in response to situations and stimuli, like when someone says “How’s it going?” and you automatically say…
How to build a (better) habit: TAPs
Here’s how to take advantage of how your mind is built (System 1 and System 2 Thinking) to build better habits: use TAPs (Trigger-Action Plans).
What are TAPs?
TAPs are a highly effective tool for establishing or modifying your habitual behavior. CFAR/LessWrong get into some nice detail about TAPs here, but essentially, you choose a goal (like a habit you’d like to develop/modify) and build a trigger that leads to a desired response/behavior.
This will require paying close attention to some liminal aspects of your conscious experience.
For example:
If you’re trying to build a habit of writing for 45 minutes every other day to make your college application process easier, pay close attention to what happens when you sit down to write but then don’t actually write.
Try to get really specific, like “When I sit down at my desk and open my laptop to work on college apps, I get a heavy sensation in my ribs, and something in my brain/toward the back of my head/top of my neck feels kind of like the urge to move + the desire for something simple, which makes me think of how heavy all the writing I have to do feels, and so I open YouTube and…”
The more specifically you can notice your chains of automatic behavior, the easier it can be to intervene in the chain (before you start heading off course) and build a new pattern.
How to create TAPs
TAPs are actually simple to create. CFAR outlines a 4-step process:
Choose a goal (a desired outcome or behavior)
Identify a relevant trigger (something that will happen naturally)
Decide on an action that you want to occur after the trigger
Rehearse the causal link (with specific, deliberate visualization; actually close your eyes and do a meticulous, complete mental run through; do this 10+ times)
Here’s a concrete example of TAP:
I live about 100 yards from the beach on a calm ocean bay, and decided that, for both health and joy, I’d like to swim at least a quarter mile several mornings a week. So here was my TAP process to instill that habit:
Goal: swim ¼ mile+ several times a week
Trigger: keep my swim goggles on the table by my desk, in the place I normally put my coffee cup in the morning, so I see them before I sit down to work, and can touch them
Action, post-trigger: after I touch them, pick up goggles; once I have them in hand, put on swim trunks, walk to ocean, swim
Rehearse: I mentally (and then physically) rehearsed this pattern a dozen times, paying careful attention to the thoughts, sensations, and emotions that arose as I saw/touched my goggles, building the causal chain.
A note that my trigger and action were specifically to “touch them” and “pick up goggles” because those specific, concrete things are much easier to build into a habit-pattern than something broad like “wake up, look outside, see ocean, go swimming.” Mine take me virtually zero effort. (Which is great, as human will power is notoriously weak relative to what people tend to think it’s capable of.) Instead, they just prompt me to remember “Oh yeah, I actually want to live a life where I go do that thing. I should go do that thing.”
Here’s another example of a TAP that my wife, Sage, built for herself:
Goal: regularly play ukulele and watch sunset while dinner is cooking
Trigger: keep my ukulele in the living room across from the sink, where it is directly and obviously in my field of view, so I see my Ukulele while prepping salad (which I make for every dinner), triggering me to remember that when I am chopping the salad I will choose what song I want to play first
Action, post-trigger: after chopping/making the salad and choosing what song I will play, I wash my hands at the sink, then pick up the ukulele ; once I do, take it outside, tune it and play while the sun sets and dinner cooks
Rehearse: I mentally (and then physically) rehearsed this pattern a dozen times, paying careful attention to the thoughts, sensations, and emotions that arose as I saw the ukulele and made the salad, building the causal chain.
So, to apply this to the hypothetical writing example from the section above (where you sit down to write but then get distracted by YouTube), and to get out of autopilot mode, you could try to build a TAP like this:
Goal: write for 45 mins every other day on college apps
Trigger: when I touch my desk chair, before I open my laptop, I ask “Is this a YouTube day?” (Note: with your trigger, you’re just giving yourself a means of allowing your System 2 to get involved before your normal automatic patterns assert themselves and you’re, say, down a YouTube rabbit hole again rather than writing—and if you don’t know what System 2 means and you skipped the section above explaining System 1 and System 2, go read it. TAPs will be much harder to implement without understanding them.)
Action: answer the question you just asked yourself (“Is this a YouTube day?” Answer: “No, this is a writing day.”), and before opening computer, start 47 minute timer on phone (45 mins + 2 mins to open files)
Rehearse: = rehearse, a bunch, like a dozen times is good, and actually slowly, carefully walk through an imaginary run each time
Tips for creating your TAPs
You’re trying to minimize the effort of acting/behaving in the way you are hoping to. So:
place your trigger and action as closely as possible (the further apart they are in time/relation, the less likely this will work)
and make them specific and concrete
and ideally simple
Also:
Start light—try building a TAP for something that will allow you to practice TAP-ing effectively while being relatively low stakes.
Actually rehearse. Again, like a dozen times. More is fine too.
You’ll have an easier time trying to build one or two TAPs at a time, rather than thinking “I’m going to change everything in my life all at once via 67 TAPs.”
Don’t beat yourself up for failing—you’ll just teach your brain to not mention things in the first place.
Enjoy.
Sources (for further reading + verification)
Andrew Simpson has worked as an educator, consultant, and curriculum writer for the past 15 years, and earned degrees from Stanford in Political Science and Drama. He feels most at home on mountain tops and in oceans.
Top Values: Insight/Growth | Truth | Integrity
