Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(51)

push the “off” button at night,



put the remote on the mantel.





Anchor Moment

Tiny Behavior

Celebration



An existing routine in your life that will remind you to do the Tiny Behavior (your new habit).

The new habit you want but you scale it back to be super tiny—and super easy.

Something you do to create a positive feeling inside of yourself (the feeling is called Shine).





This sounds wacky, I know. No one has ever advocated that you rehearse behavior sequences followed by celebrations in order to wire a habit into your brain before. But that’s what I’m telling you now.

Trust the process and rehearse this sequence seven to ten times. Make sure your celebration creates the feeling of Shine. Now watch what happens later. I predict that when you hit the off button on the TV the next evening, your brain will likely say, Hey, don’t forget to put the remote on the mantel. You will remember to do it at the right moment because you’ve trained for it. Swoosh!





Three Times to Celebrate


For the sake of simplicity, I tell people to celebrate immediately after they do a behavior they want to become a habit. But the truth is, you can become a Habit Ninja faster and more reliably by celebrating at three different times: the moment you remember to do the habit, when you’re doing the habit, and immediately after completing the habit. Each of these celebrations has a different effect.

Suppose you have this as a Tiny Habit Recipe: After I walk in the door after work, I will hang up my keys. As you are creating this habit, I encourage you to celebrate the exact moment your brain reminds you to do your new habit. Imagine that you walk in the door after work, and as you’re putting down your backpack, this idea pops into your head: Oh, now is when I said I was going to hang my keys up so I can find them tomorrow. You should celebrate at that moment. By feeling Shine, you are wiring in the habit of remembering to hang up your keys, not the habit of hanging up your keys.



Three moments for celebration





When you celebrate remembering to do a Tiny Habit, you wire in that moment of remembering. And that’s important. If you don’t remember to do a habit, you won’t do it.

Another time to celebrate is while you are doing your new habit. Your brain will then associate doing the behavior with the positive feeling of Shine. In Jill’s case, she was onboard with the idea that wiping the counter was worth celebrating. The next step was to figure out the best celebration to use to help her lock it in. After some experimentation, she landed on celebrating while she was doing it. What most reliably prompted the feeling of Shine for her was picturing the meal that her husband would make that night and imagining him giving her a kiss and saying, “Nice work, babe.” For Jill, the celebration was directly connected to the action. Her visualization allowed her to connect her small action with positive feelings of family togetherness. This celebration wired in the remembering and increased her motivation to wipe the counter in the future. Fast-forward to today: Jill wipes the counter without even thinking about it.





Keep the Habit Roots Strong


After a habit becomes automatic, you no longer need to celebrate. But, dear reader, you may need a spritz of celebration here and there to keep your habits well hydrated. There are at least two scenarios where celebration can help keep your habit firmly rooted.

You haven’t done your habit for a while because you’ve gone on vacation or changed locations. Or life has simply gotten in the way.



You are rocking this habit and increasing its intensity. Perhaps your baseline habit was two push-ups, but one day you decide to go for twenty-five push-ups to see what happens.





The first point is pretty obvious: Use celebration to rewire the habit back into your life.

Point number two is less obvious. When you increase the intensity or duration of a habit, you are exerting yourself more. This is a good time to bring back celebration. Consider my easy habit of two push-ups. That’s all I’m required to do. That said, my push-up habit grew naturally over time, and today I typically do eight or ten push-ups at a time. No sweat. However, some days I decide to do a lot more—twenty-five or thirty. When it hurts a bit, when I push into the pain, I bring celebration back. I think about it this way: If I do a habit and it’s painful or awkward or unpleasant in any way, then my brain is going to rewire and lead me to avoid the habit. Negative emotions seem to shrivel the roots of automaticity. So I keep my habit healthy and alive by celebrating extra hard to offset the pain of doing thirty push-ups. And that injection of Shine keeps the habit alive.





Celebrating without a Recipe


We have the opportunity to take actions every day that accumulate and drive our self-conception. Am I the type of person who brings a shopping cart back or leaves it in the parking lot? Am I the type of person who leaves a mess on the floor for my partner to pick up? Am I the type of person who shovels the walkway of an elderly neighbor? These are small moments that determine who we really are. Some of the time we’ll fail, and maybe we’ll be fleetingly disappointed in ourselves. Other times we’ll do a good job and momentarily feel good about ourselves. But what if we could easily make it more likely that we’d do the good behaviors again and again? What if we could quietly build on the moments when we’re being our best selves until we are our best selves? (At least most days.)