Cozy Butter · Free tool · Habits
James Clear set out four steps for building a habit in Atomic Habits, and four for breaking one that are the exact reverse. Here is what each step means, with examples from life on a GLP-1.
Every habit runs through the same four stages. Something cues it, you want it, you do it, and you get something out of it. A habit you want to keep needs all four stages working in its favour, and a habit you want to lose needs them working against it. That is why the two lists below are mirror images of each other.
If you can only get to one of the four, the third one does the most work, because most habits fail at the point of starting rather than the point of wanting.
Worth doing first
The usual reason a new habit does not happen is not that someone was unwilling. It is that nothing reminded them at the moment it needed to happen. You already do dozens of things every day without deciding to, and each one is a reminder you never forget. Attaching the new habit to one of them borrows that reliability instead of asking you to supply it. James Clear calls this habit stacking, and it is the practical version of making a habit obvious.
Pick an anchor that happens at the same point every day and that you would notice if you skipped, such as putting the coffee on, brushing your teeth, or putting your bag down when you get in. Avoid anchors like "in the mornings" or "when I get a chance", because those are stretches of time rather than events, and they are the ones people forget.
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The part people skip
A habit only you know about has a problem built into it. Skipping pays you back straight away, in time or effort saved, while the cost of it turns up months later if it turns up at all. Telling one person changes that arithmetic, because now there is a small cost today. In a review of goal setting studies, goals people made public did better than goals they kept to themselves.
It does not have to be formal, and they do not have to be working on the same thing as you. What makes the difference is one named person rather than a group, a set day they check in, and one specific question they ask, such as whether you hit five days this week. General encouragement does very little. Someone who asks you for a number does a great deal.
If there is nobody obvious, the Cozy Butter community is a reasonable place to find one.
Sixty six days was the median before a new behaviour started to feel automatic in the study that measured it, and the range across people ran from 18 days to 254. If yours is taking longer than you expected, that is the normal spread rather than a sign about you.
One last thing
One missed day does not undo what you have built. In the study that followed people taking up a new daily habit, missing a single opportunity had no measurable effect on how automatic the behaviour eventually became. You did not reset anything, and you are not back at the beginning.
What actually costs people the habit is what happens after the missed day, because it is easy to decide the run is ruined and stop altogether. The rule James Clear gives for this is never to miss twice. The day after a missed day is worth more than the day you missed, so that is the one to turn up for.