Quick Tips for Establishing Your Own Tiny Habits:
- Focus on establishing no more than 4 tiny habits at a time, although one or two at a time will suffice.
- Track your progress on your tiny habits daily, checking them off at the end of the day so that you allow yourself the possibility of doing bonus reps. (Here is the downloadable habit tracker sheet that I’m using.)
- Decide when you will do your tiny habit. Will it be tied to an activity (e.g., flossing one tooth after brushing your teeth) or a time of day or accomplished at random times of the day?
- When you forget to do your tiny habit and remember, just do it. Don’t worry if it’s at a different time or cue than you had originally planned.
- Be consistent. Do it daily. If you forget to do it on some days, that’s okay. Just keep going.
I’ve been using a new strategy to help me write more consistently and build healthier eating habits. It’s called tiny habits, and it’s based on the idea of using baby steps instead of willpower or motivation to create long-lasting and powerful changes in your life.
Examples of tiny habits include doing one push up, flossing one tooth, doing one minute of meditation, chewing 30 times per bite for a meal, writing 50 words, and opening up a new app and spending 1 minute testing it out.
Tiny habits are micro-habits that you commit to doing consistently on a day-to-day basis.
The actions are super small, so that you can easily accomplish them without much effort. They are designed to be small enough so that even on your worst day you can get them done.
If you feel motivated to do more, as you often will, you can also add bonus reps to your habit such as getting in a regular workout, writing an entire blog post or flossing all of your teeth. But just remember, there is no shame or guilt for NOT doing bonus reps. Do more only when you feel inspired to.
One of the reasons why tiny habits are effective is that we often struggle with resistance when we try to bite off too much at once.
The end goal may be to write an entire book, but if we focus on the fact that we’ve got to write three-hundred pages but haven’t written more than three pages since graduating from college we might sit down and end up stressing out over the blank screen.
I was first introduced to tiny habits several years ago while listening to a podcast interview that Paula Pant of Afford Anything conducted with the writer and habit guru Stephen Guise on overcoming procrastination and perfectionism. (If fear of failure or not doing things perfectly gets in the way of your making progress, I highly recommend that you listen to this episode. It’s only 23 minutes long and offers some great suggestions and tools. I frequently give it out to clients as homework and have listened to it multiple times myself.)
Parson’s Beach, Maine
Last month while vacationing off the coast of Southern Maine, I also read Guise’s Mini Habits for Weight Loss and it brought home again how small changes done consistently over time can lead to big transformations.
One of the points that Guise makes is that our brains are slow to change and that we often lose battles when we try to fight our subconscious mind.
Thus, the more drastic the change we’re trying to make, the more that our subconscious mind will resist. Daily mini-habits, on the other hand, are so small that they can slip past our subconscious mind.
Finally, you don’t have to have high willpower or motivation to be successful with your mini-habits. You just need a little bit.
Want to know which mini habits I am working on right now?
Here they are:
- Writing 50 words per day.
- Chewing 30 bites per forkful at one meal.
- Eating one meal a day to 80% satiety vs. 100 percent or more. (This concept is called Hara Hachi Bu and it’s based on the Japanese concept of stopping eating just before you’re full.)
- Foam rolling my legs once per day.
