How to Make Behavior Change Sticky? Four strategies from ritual and habit research
Hello Everyone,
As we are almost at the end of January, you might feel the unbearable lightness of letting your New Year’s resolutions go to the ether space and make peace with your old self. Before letting it go, I have four behavior change strategies for you to stick to your New Year’s Resolutions.
1. Set the Right Scope for Your New Year Resolution
One challenge with New Year Resolutions is defining a good enough scope balancing aspiration and specificity. We have some consensus to keep behavior change goals specific and ‘tiny’ to lower the barrier to action, thanks to all the self-help habits literature. However, if your behavioral goal lacks a long-term aspiration, you will not find that oomph, energizing motivation to kick off your new behavior.
To overcome this challenge, my first recommendation is to scaffold your New Year’s resolution goal. First set a high-level aspirational goal, such as start exercising to be an athletic person. Then, brainstorm ways to make that goal more specific. Once you identify a series of goals to get to that high-level goal, pick a few that you can start practicing. NPR LifeKit’s New Year’s Resolution Planner provides a good model to get some more concrete ideas. For example, for the “start exercising” goal, they identified smaller goals such as “every movement counts.”
2. Fresh starts are real; lean on their power.
Good news for those working on a New Year’s resolution. According to research conducted by Deng Chai, Katy Milkman, and Jason Riis, temporal marks such as the beginning of a new year, a new week, and birthdays give people a perception of a clean slate where they can concentrate on the bigger picture, get motivated with their aspirational behavior, and surpass their past imperfections. They called this the fresh start effect. Milkman and her team also discovered that new start effects might be less effective if you are already in a good flow state. In their research, they looked at baseball players who switched teams mid-season. They discovered that baseball players who weren’t performing improved it after the mid-year disruption. However, the fresh start negatively affected baseball players who were doing well.
Although I appreciate the opportunity that comes with a fresh start, I find it hard to double down on this effect in the daily grind. This is partly due to the abstract nature of time. To overcome this challenge of abstractness, rituals can be helpful as they externalize things and make the disruption concrete and graspable. You can visualize such a temporal mark with a ritual and build on the fresh start effect.
For instance, every year in early January, my family and I take a trip to a nearby beach for our New Year ritual. We look at the ocean’s vastness, reflect, make a wish for the new year, walk along the beach, and enjoy lunch afterward. The ocean’s vastness gives us that sense of a clean slate and a perspective on the previous year. You can plan a similar clean-slate ritual experience, which can be felt in different spaces, including plains, mountains, and forests.
3. Motivation is fragile; strengthen it by enriching the experiences surrounding the behavior you want to change.
When we think of changing behavior, we initially think of incentives and extrinsic motivation, which is a good strategy. However, it would be best to harness intrinsic motivation to make your new behavior sticky.
Recently, I came across a beautiful definition of motivation.
Motivation is energy directed towards a goal.
Yes!
Motivation is energy, and you harness energy by physically, emotionally, and intellectually moving and generating it. This means you need to have moving experiences.
You can have moving experiences by making your new behavior engaging. For this, here are several strategies to devise.
Coined by Katy Milkman and her team, temptation bundling is about anchoring your new behavior to the things you enjoy. For instance, when you want to go to the gym but don’t enjoy the experience, you can bundle it with something you enjoy doing. In her case, this was to watch her favorite Netflix show. She created a virtuous energy cycle by bundling it to a more desired experience, thus sticking to her new behavior.
Ayelet Fishbach discovers that you must provide immediate payoffs to make goals sticky. For instance, when you go for a run, you get a quick dopamine high from the experience. In behaviors that don’t necessarily have that kind of immediate payoff, intentionally sprinkle some payoffs. That’s when rituals become handy. For instance, when I am about to complete a writing assignment, I give myself a good cup of coffee or a drink I usually don’t get. In this way, I added a layer of specialness to a relatively dry writing activity.
4. Shift from behavior mechanics to behavior fluidity
When you leverage the fresh start effect and make your behavior more engaging, you create a baseline for success. However, to sustain your new behavior, you need repetition and consistency. For this to happen, you must build a solid context to support you.
Research suggests architecting cues and triggers in our environment to establish a supportive context. Cues can be temporal, tied to a place, a person, or a combination of them. For instance, you can place the dumbbells on your bedside to exercise more. Every morning, when you wake up and every night before you enter your bed, the first thing you see is your dumbbell for you to do your weight exercise. Or you can anchor your new behavior to an existing one. When I brush my teeth every morning, I will do five push-ups.
This cue architecting is good for you to lower the barrier to acting. However, research from Katy Milkman shows that flexibility in cues is critical to sticky habits. Their research with Google employees tested whether strict cues lead to better habit formation. Group One got rewarded for going to the gym at the same time every week. Group Two, however, got rewarded for going to the gym on their flexible schedule. The results of the study were surprising. The expectation was to have Group One form stickier habits. What they found is people in Group Two outperformed their peers in Group One as means of going having a more sticky exercise habit.
To improve your flexibility muscles, it is recommended to establish cues that are not dependent on specific time or location. For instance, you can choose cues that can be performed anywhere, such as brushing your teeth or taking a shower. This way, even if you are on a business trip or in a new environment, you can still perform your desired behavior by relying on these cues.
Another effective strategy is to diversify your cues by assigning multiple ones to the behavior you are trying to achieve. This allows you to have a backup plan in case one of the cues fails or becomes unavailable. By having multiple cues, you increase your chances of successfully executing the desired behavior and strengthening your flexibility muscles.
One final idea supporting flexibility in your New Year resolution is integrating your fall-out days in advance to sustain your confidence. Katy Milkman calls them “mulligans.” For instance, if you set a goal to exercise seven days a week, you can give yourself an excuse for two days. In this way, when you miss those two days, you don’t feel discouraged or lost confidence in yourself.
Most of these ideas stem from my recent readings of three beautiful books I highly recommend: Katy Milkman’s How To Change, Wendy Woods’ Good Habits, Bad Habits, and Ayelet Fishbachs’ Get it Done.
This article was first published in Culturescapes, our newsletter that features practices and insights for crafting better cultures for individuals, teams, and organizations. You can subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Happy New Year’s Resolutions!
