how to build habits that stick: 6 tactics, from the first rep to breaking bad ones

Huberman's first tool comes from procedural memory, the kind that holds a sequence of steps, like a recipe. on the transcript he says it does not need a quiet room or closed eyes. you "just think about the very specific sequence of steps that's required to execute that habit." his example is an espresso habit: "Walk into the kitchen, turn on the espresso machine, draw the espresso."

the tactic: walk through the habit in your head, start to finish. why it works, in his words: "Your nervous system isn't stupid." it "knows the difference between a thought and an action", but the rehearsal fires the same neurons the habit will need, so when you show up, "it's as if the dominoes fall more easily." you do not need to repeat it daily: "Do it once, maybe twice." he says it also helps when you are trying to get back into a habit you dropped.

try this week: pick one habit you want. tonight, write or say out loud every step, from where you are standing to the last second of it. do it once more before you start tomorrow.

Greenberg did not guess what works. on the transcript: "We ran a giant study on habit formation." his team gave people a random mix of 20 techniques and tracked them for a month. many did little. one stood out: "the most effective technique we found, the most promising one in our study, was one that we call habit reflection."

the tactic: ask what helped last time. "you first think about a habit you succeeded at in the past." then write: "what did you do to help you succeed?" and finally: "how can you apply what you learned from doing that past habit to this new habit?" he likes it because "It's self-adapting." it uses what already works for you. for busy days, add a tiny version: "You didn't get to the gym. You do 10 squats on a day that you don't go to the gym." in his study people did not hide in the tiny version. they "were more successful with the big habit".

try this week: write down one habit you kept for months, and three things that helped. copy at least one onto your new habit. then pick its tiny version for bad days.

most plans break on the first missed day. Huberman's system plans for it, on the transcript: "you write down six things that you would like to do every day for 21 days." but "the expectation is that you'll only complete four to five of those each day." the point is not the six habits. it is "the habit of performing habits."

the tactic: build the miss into the plan, and never compensate. if you miss a day, there is no punishment, and you do not do extra the next day: "you don't do eight the next day in order to compensate." he also suggests thinking in two-day chunks. then comes the test. for the next 21 days you add nothing new: "You simply try and maintain the ones that you've built in that first 21 days." only what still runs on its own counts as a habit.

try this week: write six habits on one card. tick off four or five a day, no more. on day 22, stop adding and watch which ones keep going without the card.

Holiday borrows a scene from Cormac McCarthy's The Road. a boy tells his father, on the transcript: "if you break the little promises you'll break the big ones". his read: snooze the alarm or skip the writing, and either way you train something. "you're either building the muscle that says I do what I say I keep the commitments that I make or you're building the muscle that says I make excuses". and "you're keeping promises to yourself that nobody even knows that you made".

the tactic: keep the small ones, and when you slip, do not make it who you are. "when we mess up that we don't identify with that". he uses the sobriety picture of falling off the wagon: the wagon keeps going and "you can get back on it anytime". all or nothing, he says, is an excuse in disguise: "it's actually very convenient to be all or nothing". after a bad week, "I have to sit down now" and do a little.

try this week: make one tiny promise to yourself each morning and keep it. if you miss a habit, do a small version of it the same day.

host Steven Bartlett asks about a habit he has filed under who he is: he grew up in a messy home and is still messy. Huberman, on the transcript: "I think stories are very powerful and very dangerous." a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, so it feels fixed. his view: "neuroplasticity really involves taking an existing story and dismantling some component of it."

the tactic: write the opposite story and let it interrupt the old one. he points to Byron Katie style questions: is it always true? then, for the messy example: "write out one page about what a tidy person you really are." he admits "You'll know that's a lie, right?" the point is to break the fluency of the old story, so the habit gets interrupted. why not a sticky note? "We know sticky notes work for about one day." and "The nervous system only changes if something is new and different."

try this week: pick a bad habit you call part of who you are. write one page as the person who does not have it. read it back the next time the habit shows up.

Huberman starts with what does not work well. in that review, reminders helped at first, but on the transcript he says "notifications to either engage in habits or to not engage in habits actually were not very effective over time." catching a habit before it starts is hard, because many habits run too fast to stop.

the tactic: use the moment after. "the period immediately after the bad habit execution is a unique opportunity" to do a different, positive behavior. his example is picking up your phone during focused work. put it down, then do something else that is good for you: "maybe you go have a glass of water." or breathwork, or five minutes of a language. it creates "a kind of a double habit that starts with a bad habit and then ends with a good habit", and over time that makes the bad habit easier to spot. keep it easy: "You don't want it to be something that's very hard to execute."

try this week: pick one bad habit and one easy good one, like ten squats or a glass of water. every time you catch the bad one, do the good one right after. no guilt, just the swap.