Anchor a New Habit to One You Already Have
Stanford researcher BJ Fogg found that habits stick best when they are anchored to something you already do automatically, not when you rely on motivation to remember them. His formula shrinks the new behavior down until willpower barely matters at all.
For years, the standard advice for building a new habit was to find more motivation, more willpower, more determination to make the change stick. Stanford researcher BJ Fogg, who has spent decades running the university's Behavior Design Lab, built a different model after watching that advice fail for most people most of the time. His formula, distilled into three letters, is B equals M A P, meaning a behavior happens only when motivation, ability, and a prompt all show up together at the same moment. Since motivation is the least reliable of the three, rising and falling with mood, sleep, and stress in ways nobody fully controls, Fogg's method focuses almost entirely on the other two.
The practical technique that came out of this, described in his 2019 book Tiny Habits, is built around what he calls an anchor. Instead of trying to remember to do a new behavior at some point during the day, you attach it directly to something you already do automatically, without fail, every single day. Fogg's own well known example was flossing, a habit people notoriously struggle to build. His version was to floss exactly one tooth, immediately after brushing, using the sentence structure after I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth. The existing habit, brushing, becomes the prompt for the new one, which removes the hardest part of habit formation, remembering to start, almost entirely.
The tiny part of Tiny Habits is doing more work than it sounds like it should. Fogg deliberately shrank the target behavior down to something almost comically small, one tooth rather than a full flossing routine, two pushups rather than a full workout, one sentence of a journal rather than a full page. The logic is that a behavior this small requires so little ability that it can be performed even on a low motivation, exhausted, distracted day, which is exactly the kind of day that normally derails a new habit before it has had a chance to become automatic. Once the tiny version is reliably happening, it tends to expand naturally on its own, since showing up for one pushup on the floor makes doing five more feel like the easier option, not a separate decision requiring its own burst of willpower.
The tiny part of Tiny Habits is doing more work than it sounds like it should.
The third piece of Fogg's method, celebration, gets skipped over constantly by people who adopt the anchor idea without the rest of it. Fogg has participants do something that produces a small burst of genuine positive emotion immediately after completing the tiny behavior, a fist pump, a quick internally spoken good job, anything that registers as a small win in the moment rather than being saved up for some future milestone. His reasoning, drawn from behavioral psychology more broadly, is that emotions, not repetition counts, are what actually wire a behavior into something that feels automatic, and a behavior performed correctly but joylessly tends to stay effortful for much longer than one paired with a genuine, if small, hit of positive feeling right when it happens.
This approach is a specific and fairly narrow tool rather than a complete theory of habit change, and Fogg himself has been clear that it works best for behaviors a person is trying to add, rather than ones they are trying to remove. But the anchor mechanism specifically, borrowing the reliability of an existing habit to prompt a new one, solves a genuinely common failure point. Most abandoned habits do not fail because someone lacked willpower in the exact moment they were supposed to act. They fail because the moment to act never got flagged at all, lost somewhere in an ordinary day that was already full of other automatic behavior running quietly in the background.
For a man who has tried and quietly dropped a string of new habits, the useful diagnostic question this research suggests is not what is wrong with my discipline, but what is my anchor, and whether the new behavior actually got attached to something specific enough that it fires on its own. A resolution with no anchor is not really a plan yet. It is closer to a hope with a deadline attached to it.