3 Ways to Build Better Habits (That Actually Stick)

January 12 was National Quitters Day—the day most people quit their New Year’s resolutions. This means most people don’t even make it two weeks into building better habits. If you’re struggling to break bad habits or make good ones, here are three strategies psychologists use to help people build better habits:

1. Perform a Functional Analysis

Before you can change a habit, you have to understand what purpose it has. Psychologists do this using what’s called a functional analysis. A functional analysis is when we look at a habit and ask, “What function does it serve?” — meaning, what need is it fulfilling for you?

Once you understand its purpose, you can find an alternative (better) habit to replace it.

For example, let’s say you want to eat healthier but just keep eating junk food. You’ve tried hunger suppressants, fad diets, and making “healthy” junk food snacks. But you keep eating junk food, which is sabotaging your health goals.

Do a functional analysis:

“What function does [eating junk food] serve?”

Maybe, you realize you cope with stress with junk food (it makes you feel better and gives you a sense of control when you otherwise feel powerless or overwhelmed).

• Maladaptive (bad) behavior: Eating junk food.
• Function of behavior: To cope with stress.

Now, you can find an alternative behavior that fulfills the same function.

Alternative (better) behaviors that serve the same function to help you cope with stress might include:

• Meditating.
• Journaling.
• Exercising.

This may be why your old strategies didn’t work: Hunger suppressants, fad diets, and “healthy” junk food didn’t serve the function of helping you cope with stress. So you continued to revert to eating junk food because your need to cope with stress wasn’t being effectively met any other way.

If you instead determined the function of eating junk food for you was to stave off boredom, then you’d need to find alternative behaviors that also helped you stave off boredom.

So before you try to change a behavior, seek to understand why you do it in the first place.

2. Leverage Being a Cognitive Miser

Humans are “cognitive misers,” which basically means we’re lazy. From an evolutionary perspective, being lazy (aka conserving our mental and physical energy) is adaptive: It’s helped us survive as a species.

When something is convenient, we’re more likely to do it. When something is inconvenient, we’re less likely to do it.

Most people struggle with being lazy, but we can learn to leverage our laziness to build better habits by understanding a simple concept: friction.

If we want to increase a good habit, we can decrease friction to make it convenient. If we want to decrease a bad habit, we can increase friction to make it inconvenient.

For example, if you want to decrease the habit of eating cookies, then you can increase the friction of getting cookies. Instead of keeping cookies on your desk or in the kitchen, maybe you decide to not keep them in your house at all, so that when you get a craving for cookies, you have to weigh that craving against the effort it’ll take to get dressed, drive to the store, find the cookies, buy the cookies, drive back, change into comfortable clothes, then finally eat the cookies. You’re looking at spending 30-plus minutes to acquire said cookies.

You’ve made getting cookies inconvenient.

Most “bad” habits are impulsive, so the more friction we can add, the more of a delay we create, and we will be less impulsive overall.

Plus, we’re lazy.

Spending 30-plus minutes to get cookies (when the actual craving will be gone in a couple of minutes) will typically be too much effort. Not always, mind you, but often. If you’re dead determined to get cookies, then you still might.

But on the whole, it’ll be too much friction.

On the other hand, if you want to increase the habit of reading every day, then you can decrease the friction of reading.

Instead of keeping a book on your bookshelf, you can keep it at your computer desk or on top of your laptop so that it’s the first thing you see when you sit down to work, which makes it convenient to open it up and read a few pages.

It’s OK to be lazy—to be a cognitive miser—if you can leverage it to build better habits by increasing or decreasing friction accordingly.

3. Build in Behavioral Nudges

This is a key concept of environmental design: Basically, assume you’re going to have zero motivation when it counts. Now, with that assumption in place, how can you design your environment to facilitate your desired habits?

For example, let’s say you want to drink more water throughout the day. Instead of keeping your water on the floor beside you (out of your peripheral vision), you can keep it in front of you on your desk (within your peripheral vision).

I will literally drink two to three times as much water if my water bottle is in front of me versus on the floor. Even if it’s the same distance from me (within arm’s reach), if it’s not in my peripheral, then it’s out of sight, out of mind. But if it’s in my peripheral, then it’s in sight, in mind.

Seeing your water bottle acts as a “nudge” to engage in the behavior of drinking it.

Grocery stores use behavioral nudges to get you to impulse buy things all the time. Think about it: You’ve just finished shopping—diligently checking off everything on your shopping list—and you get to the register. Suddenly you’re bombarded with all the impulsive buys at the checkout counter:

• Sugary sodas in the cooler you have to walk past. Oh, I’m thirsty all of a sudden.
• Packs of gum at the counter. Oh, I forgot I’m almost out. Let me get another pack.
• All the candy bars on either side of you as you try to put your groceries on the counter. I mean, one candy bar won’t hurt. Let me just get one as a treat…

That’s environmental design.

Think of the habits you want to build, then consider how you can design your environment to facilitate those habits by using the right behavioral nudges.

Final Thoughts on Habits

Here’s a simple concept to remember when it comes to habits: We don’t do things for no reason. Every habit we have and everything we do, for better or worse: We do it for a reason.

The better we get at understanding the why behind our habits, the better we can become at breaking bad habits and making good ones that set us up for success.

These three strategies are the foundation to help you do just that.