This is the SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN way to build habits in 2026.

Forming a new healthy habit is one of the best ways to improve your life. But what actually works? What can help you create a new habit that sticks? In order to find out, we ran two large studies and tested 22 different habit formation techniques. So, how did our first study work? Well, unfortunately, we know that many behavior change techniques are simply not effective when they’re tested rigorously. Because of that, we wanted to cast a very wide net to find

Potentially promising techniques. That’s the reason we implemented 22 habit formation techniques including the following. One, solemn promise. Writing a promise that you’ll practice your habit every day. Two, home reminders. Writing a note to yourself and placing it somewhere where you’ll see it. Three, reward. Coming up with a reward you can give yourself every time you start performing your habit. Four, mantra. Saying, “I cannot fail.” And repeating it to yourself 10 times. And finally, five, mini habit. Coming up with a tiny

Version of your habit you can do on days when you can’t do the full thing. Take a few moments now to consider which of these techniques do you think worked in our study and which do you think were duds? I’ll give you a hint. Only two out of these five methods turned out to be promising. All right, now let’s get back to the study design. We recruited 477 participants who were all asked to pick a goal for a new habit they wanted to

Form and to report on their progress every week for four weeks. That way, we could track how many times they did their habit each week and to what extent they felt their habit goal was met. To help us answer questions about what really works, the participants were randomized into different groups. Some participants were in the pure control group. They did nothing other than report back on their progress. Others were in a reminders only control group. They were just like the pure control

Group, but they also got daily email reminders about their habit. These two control groups helped us see if the habit formation techniques were doing better than nothing at all. And they helped us check if daily email reminders were actually helpful. Yet another group got a behavior change method that has been previously studied in the psychology literature, sometimes known as Whoop, which stands for wish outcome obstacle plan. Simplifying a little, to do the Whoop technique, you first think

Of a goal that you wish to achieve, such as eating more healthy vegetables every week. Then you visualize getting the outcome from it that you want most, such as better health. After that, you take some time to describe an obstacle that could get in the way of the plan, such as running out of vegetables to cook and eating something unhealthy instead. Finally, you come up with an if then plan to overcome the obstacle. For example, if you run out of veggies, then

You’ll immediately buy more at the store. This Whoop method is also sometimes known by the less sexy name, mental contrasting with implementation intentions. Including this Whoop group helped to see if this commonly used wellstudy technique was better than the other techniques we were testing. The next group of participants was the biggest one. Each participant in this group was randomized to try five out of the 22 possible habit techniques. This group was also the most important group

Because it allowed us to look at whether people stuck to their habit more when one of these habit techniques was randomly assigned to them compared to when it wasn’t. The final group of participants also got five out of 22 habit techniques to try. But unlike the prior group, they got to pick which techniques to try rather than having them assigned at random. This allowed us to investigate whether people are more successful if they choose which techniques to do rather than having

Those techniques assigned to them. Okay, so what did we actually find in our study? The first result, which surprised us a lot, was that the control group that got daily email reminders did not succeed at their habit any better than the control group that didn’t. They practice their habits 3.3 days per week and 3.2 days per week, respectively, which is not a statistically significant difference. Is this because reminders aren’t important? No. As we’ll soon see, reminders actually seem to matter. But

Email reminders in particular didn’t work. Perhaps people simply start ignoring them when they come every day, or people don’t check their email reliably. Or maybe a positive effect of email reminders on habits is just too small for a study to have reliably detected it. The second result, which also surprised us, is that the muchstudied Whoop technique didn’t seem to work in this context. The group assigned to do the Whoop technique maybe had a slight boost in their habit over

The first week, but by the end of four weeks, we were seeing no difference between those doing Whoop and those in the control group. Does that mean that Whoop is useless? Not necessarily. Other studies have found it effective for some types of behavior change. So perhaps it’s just less effective for forming new daily habits than for other things. Or perhaps our study was just an unlucky fluke. But our study does provide some evidence against Whoop as a highly

Effective generalpurpose behavior change strategy. Now here’s another chance for you to make a guess. Did choosing which of the five out of 22 habit techniques people get to perform beat having those techniques assigned to them at random? Nope. We detected no difference between choosing the habit information techniques yourself and having them randomly assigned to you. At this point, you may wonder, was our entire study just no effects? Well, thankfully, we actually did find some interesting positive effects. The first positive

Finding is that motivation was a meaningful predictor of the extent to which participants succeeded at forming their habit. This makes sense intuitively, but often what makes sense intuitively fails to work in rigorous studies. It’s good to see that we were able to verify it. to suggest that if you’re trying to decide between two different healthy habits to form, it may be wise to choose whichever of the two you feel more motivated to go after. Now, we get to the most interesting

Findings from the study. Of the 22 habit formation techniques that we randomized participants to try, a whopping 17 appear to be totally useless. Just two were slightly promising and just three were promising. The first slightly promising technique is what we called listing habit benefits. It involves making a list of the benefits the chosen habit could provide and pondering which benefit among those is most important to you. This technique is designed to increase your motivation for whatever

Habit you’ve chosen. While on its own, its results were not very convincing, it was more effective for participants with lower motivation, which makes sense because that is the issue it’s aiming to address. The second slightly promising technique we called support of a friend. It simply involves asking a friend or family member to support you in your habit change efforts. Even though we’re classifying it as slightly promising, the effects of this technique were weak and might actually have been the result

Of chance. Now, let’s get into the more promising techniques. Remember earlier when we had you guess which habit techniques worked? Well, two of the ones we showed you then seem to help with habit success. So, here are those five techniques again. Can you remember which you guessed worked? Making a solemn promise to do the habit every day was totally useless. Choosing a reward for doing your habit, that didn’t work either. Repeating the mantra, I cannot fail, ironically, totally failed. Home

Reminders, which involved writing a physical reminder note to yourself and placing it where you’ll see it, actually did seem to help. It’s especially interesting that this was helpful considering the daily email reminders, did not seem to help. Perhaps it’s because a physical reminder in your home is more salient than a daily email. Additionally, the mini habit technique, also sometimes called tiny habits, which involves coming up with a small version of your habit that you can do on days

When you don’t have time to do the full thing, also appear to be helpful. Participants who did this mini habit technique ended up meeting their habit goals at a higher rate. Finally, the single most promising technique from our study is one that we call habit reflection. It involves three steps. First, you think back to a previous successful habit that you formed. Second, you identify what factors and techniques you think led to your success with that past habit. Third, you write

Down a plan for how you can apply what you learned from that past success to this new habit that you’re hoping to perform. The impressive effectiveness of this habit reflection technique was perhaps the most interesting and surprising finding of the whole study. Since our study tested so many different techniques, you might wonder, could even the most positive seeming findings from the study just be a fluke due to random chance? That’s an important question. To help make sure that wasn’t the case, we

Ran an entire second study. In the second study, we bundled together the five most promising techniques from the first study into a habit formation tool that we call daily ritual. Daily ritual includes all five of these methods: habit reflection, mini habits, home reminders, support of a friend, and listing habit benefits. Participants were asked to pick a habit they wanted to form, and then they were either randomly assigned to use the daily ritual tool or to the control group. We

Then tracked how many days they did their habit over the next six weeks. While the differences were not massive, the participants who used daily ritual stuck to their habits more effectively than those in the control group. Those using daily ritual also reported a higher degree of success at accomplishing their habit formation goals overall. The coolest part though is that we made the tool from our study called Daily Ritual available for you to use entirely for free. Find the link in

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