Hi, I'm Maria Gidoy and this is NPR's Life Kit. A lot of the episodes we do at Life Kit involve

changing behavior from reducing foodways to reading more to setting up and sticking to a budget,

forming new habits as 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. Well, guess what? Epiphany's happen, but you can't design one

for yourself. So take that one off the table. Number two, you can redesign your environment to

change your behavior. That can work, but BJ says there's an even simpler way to start habit.

Number three is to make tiny changes in wire and new habits in these small incremental ways.

And that's very consistent and reliable way to do it and that's what Tiny Habits is all about.

In this episode, we'll learn all about Tiny Habits and how to make them work for you.

We often tend to think of changing our behavior as like a monumental task. Like we put a lot of

pressure on ourselves. You know, there's that saying go big or go home. And oftentimes I think we

just end up going home. You know, it's for decades the way that we're told to change and change

our behavior sets us up to fail. It's easier to create habits and change than most people think.

And it's faster than most people think and it can even be fun if you do it in the right way.

There are three things that come together at the same time for any behavior to happen.

There's got to be motivation to do the behavior. Second is the ability to do the behavior.

And the third is a prompt and the prompt is anything that reminds you or says do this behavior now.

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