Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. My list of failed New Year's resolutions

is a thing of wonder. A morning stretching routine, a regular journaling practice, those

guitar scale exercises I was going to do every day. I never even started doing any of them.

But it could be that I was shooting too big, at least according to BJ Fogg, a Stanford behavior scientist. He talked to NPR's

Maria Godoy for our Life Kit podcast about what it actually takes to fold something new into our

lives. He wrote a book about it called Tiny Habits, the

small changes that change everything. And in the interview, he really emphasizes the

tiny part of the title. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant

events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your

podcasts. Hi, I'm Maria Godoy, and this is NPR's Life Kit.

A lot of the episodes we do at Life Kit involve changing behavior, from reducing food waste

to reading more, to setting up and sticking to a budget.

Forming new habits is key.

So you can think of this episode as a sort of companion episode,

a booster shot, if you will, for any of our other ones. When it comes to lasting change,

you basically have three approaches to it. That's BJ Fogg. He's a behavior scientist at

Stanford and the author of a new book, Tiny Habits, the small changes that change everything.

And he's here to tell us how to make habits that actually last, no matter what habit you want to start.

And that begins with understanding how behavior change happens.

Number one, you can have an epiphany.

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