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Achieve Your Goals by Changing Habits

Perhaps you've had the experience of setting goals only to lose sight of them in the rush of daily life, then realize later that you've made little progress. When it comes to certain kinds of goals—ones involving health or personal improvement, for example—that's pretty common. And it corresponds with what science has revealed about what it takes to change behavior.

Why Habits Matter

Humans are creatures of habit. Most of your actions are unconscious and automatic, the result of repetition and routine. That's good in many ways. It's a survival mechanism that helps your brain work efficiently as you navigate the hundreds of choices you face every day. You stop at red lights and go when they turn green. You have coffee in the morning and put on shoes before you go outside. You brush your teeth before you go to bed. If you thought consciously about every action you took during the day, you'd be exhausted. You'd also get a lot less done.

The downside of habits comes when you settle into patterns of unhealthy or unproductive behavior. That might be a sedentary lifestyle without enough physical activity or eating habits that are bad for your health. It might be spending habits that push you deeper into debt. It might be patterns of interaction that lead to arguments.

Why Willpower Isn't Enough to Achieve Some Goals

Willpower takes conscious effort. It relies on rational, future-oriented thought to counter or suppress urges from a more primitive part of your brain. And those urges can be powerful. "I want that cookie now," is a primitive urge, and responding to it brings an immediate reward. "If I eat the cookie, I won't lose weight, and I'll feel bad later," is a rational thought—the application of willpower—and acting on it brings a far less tangible reward sometime in the future.

The human brain tends to overvalue immediate rewards and undervalue future benefits. So, when willpower and your immediate wants face off in a series of matchups, willpower tends to weaken and give in.

To break the cycle of unwanted and unhealthy behaviors—your bad habits—you need to overwrite them with new patterns of unconscious thought—new habits—that advance you toward your goals.

How to Harness the Power of Habits to Reach Your Goals

Start with a vision.

Choose one goal that requires you to change some aspect of your behavior. It might be to get out of debt or increase your savings. It might be to lose weight or learn a valuable skill for work. Make sure it's something important to you, a goal you are willing to work toward.

Commit to your goal.

Write it down. Post it where you'll be reminded of it regularly. Some people find it helpful to make a visual image of their goal for continued inspiration. You might tell supportive friends or family members about your goal to affirm your commitment, build in accountability, and enlist their encouragement. Employee wellbeing programs often offer access to professional life coaches, who are skilled in helping individuals develop and follow a plan to reach their goals.

Take small steps toward your goal.

Start with one small, manageable step toward your goal. If your goal is to read more books, read one page before you go to bed tonight. If it's to become more physically active, go for a five-minute walk today. The key is to take a step today—to take action, not just plan to act—so you see what the step feels like. Then repeat that step tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until it becomes a new habit.

When you're ready, build on the step and extend it. Read a chapter every night. Move from a five-minute walk to a 10- or 20-minute walk.

Small steps are much more likely to lead you to lasting change than big steps are. They're easier to master, which will give you a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of reward. They are easier to sustain, and they're easier to build on.

Understand what triggers your habits.

A trigger is the start of a habitual action. If you want to build a new habit, make the trigger visible. Put your walking shoes in plain sight by the front door. Schedule time for skills training in your calendar with an alert.

If you want to replace an old habit with a new one, figure out what triggers the old habit and come up with a new behavior to substitute in response. What is happening, or what are you feeling or thinking, when you get the urge to eat an unhealthy snack? What might you do instead when you experience that trigger? Plan and practice that new response until it overrides the old habit.

Sometimes, you can manage an unhealthy habit by eliminating the triggers or making them invisible. If there is no ice cream in the freezer, you won't see it and be tempted to eat it. If you have trouble controlling your spending, keep your credit cards in the back of a drawer. Whenever possible, avoid situations that will force you to rely on willpower to short-circuit a bad habit.

Make the new habit attractive and enjoyable.

Your current set of habits are lodged in your brain and behavior patterns because they satisfy specific cravings. To change bad habits, or build new habits, you'll need to build new cravings by making the new behaviors enjoyable and satisfying.

This is why diets that focus only on self-denial and not on the pleasure of healthy eating often fail over the long term. To change eating habits in a sustainable way, you'll need to find new combinations of food that you enjoy eating and that help you reach your health goal.

In the same way, you can also make exercise more enjoyable by pairing it with another activity you enjoy, such as listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks; or by exercising with a friend. Over time, when you find a form of physical activity you enjoy, the exercise itself will become its own reward.

Tracking your progress can also be a good motivator. Keep a log of what you're learning as you master a new skill. Track your weight or your steps. Watch your debt balance go down or your savings balance go up. Seeing progress is a form of intrinsic reward.

Make the new habit easy.

Eliminate obstacles to following the new habit by making it easy:

• Focus on the first moments of a new activity, instead of on an extended action. Decide to walk for two minutes. Once you get your walking shoes on and are out in the fresh air, you may want to continue for longer.
• Keep healthy snacks on hand at home and work.
• Arrange for your bank to automatically transfer money to your savings account every week or pay period.

Expect and plan for lapses.

Even with the best intentions, you can expect to have lapses as you build new habits. Plan ahead to think about what you'll do when that happens—how you'll bounce back from the lapse and learn from it. When a lapse occurs, think about what caused you to stray from your plan. What was the trigger? Was the new behavior too hard to follow or not enjoyable enough?

Don't let a lapse lead to self-criticism or a feeling of defeat. Instead, look at it as a piece of information that will help you understand your habits and the best way to change them. Approach changing habits as an experiment. Be open to trying new approaches if the first one you choose isn't working.

Keep going.

It takes time and repetition to override a bad habit or build a new one. But if you pay attention to your behavior triggers and make your new habits easy and satisfying, they will take hold over time. And when they do, you may find it hard to imagine going back to your old ways. The new habits will become second nature. They'll give you pleasure in themselves while advancing you on the path to your goal.

And unlike the traditional approach to setting and striving for goals, changing habits can take you even further. Once you've reached your original goal, you'll have established the habits to keep going and continue to grow and improve yourself—to overshoot your goal. You'll also have the tools to tackle another goal by adopting other new habits.