How To Form New Habits & Create Change - Part 1

2 steps you can follow to start changing behavior today

Author

Juan Diego Diaz
April 18, 2024

TLDR:

Follow these 2 key steps to motivate people to change and form habits. Part 1.

  1. Focus on breaking old habits and forming new ones at the start of new periods or important milestones in people’s lives

  2. Motivation is not enough, you need a trigger to start the habit formation

✍️ Can we influence ourselves & our clients to form new habits & embrace change?

If you are like most people, you have at least once made a New Year resolution promise.

“OK, this new year I will do more exercise”, “I will eat less junk food”, “I will start learning a new language”

In the beginning, we are all in but after a couple of weeks our motivation goes down and we default to our old selves. That is until we see an opportunity for another fresh start. Maybe your birthday is coming up, or maybe you are moving to a new city, or starting a new job. Then we feel we have a clean slate and can pick up that new habit we wanted to embrace again.

The point is that we are more likely to change, or at least we are willing to change more when we are going to a “fresh start” situation.

🧠 Fresh Starts are your new best friend

Researchers from Wharton School found that people were more likely to adopt new behaviors during periods of fresh starts. Big things like birthdays, different calendar years, and becoming parents. But also quite mundane things like the start of a new month or even a new week.

The researchers said that the likeliness of change is because when we enter a new period, our relationship with our “past selves” weakens, making us more prone to change our behavior. Although we want to be consistent with what we believe about ourselves, we use these “period changes” as an excuse, or motivation, to change.

They found that the probability of people going to the gym increased by 15% at the beginning of a month and by 47% as a new term began.

In a more practical experiment, researchers “invented” the fresh start period. People were asked to sign up for an email reminder service to help them pursue their individual goals.

In one scenario, the send-out dates of the emails were neutrally framed. For example, the second Wednesday in March, the first Monday of June, etc. In the other scenario, these same dates were framed as fresh starts. The first day of spring, the first day of summer, etc.

In the fresh start scenario, 26% of people signed up for the service vs. 7% of sign-ups in the neutral scenario. Almost a 300% increase by just reframing normal dates as fresh starts.

💡Motivation is not enough, we need triggers

Now that you know when to motivate people to change, you need people to stick to these changes. The best way to do this is by leveraging a trigger. A trigger could be a feeling, a time, or a place that incentivizes action.

An experiment showed the power of triggers beautifully. 3 groups of people were chosen to see how much they would exercise in 2 weeks. The first group was told to just record their exercise habits. Here, only 35% did some exercise at least once a week.

The second group was told to record their workout times and additionally, they got information on all the benefits of working out. For this group, 38% had at least one workout session per week. A tiny improvement but not good enough.

However, the last group was the same as the second, but the researcher told them to state when, with whom, and where they were planning to exercise. The idea was that one of these things should trigger the reminder to work out.

The result was outstanding. 91% of the third group exercised at least once a week. And note that there was no cost and no big difference involved. It was just an extra question that served as a trigger that increased the likelihood of sticking to a habit by almost 200%.

✅ How to apply this to your business

Here are 4 things you could do based on the implications of these insights.

  1. If you want to get more customers, you should start placing more budget on the first days of the week, months, or maybe the first few weeks in a new period. You can easily do this if you are running online campaigns. Fresh starts are great for adopting new behaviors and breaking old ones.

  2. You could target people who are going through a “new phase” in their life. For example, people who are 19, 29, 39, etc. are more likely to adopt new behaviors because they are going to a “reflection phase” in their lives. This is based on science. I will link the source below.

  3. Another new phase could be people moving to a new city, people becoming parents, or people getting a new job. These are important milestones in people’s lives and you can target it online!

  4. Create a trigger for your product or the habit you want people to adopt. For example, triggers can be as simple as push notifications or email reminders. This works if you have an existing pool of customers and you have their permission to contact them. A great example of this is Duolingo. They have a really good way of reminding their customers to do their learning lessons. They make it funny and they also add the loss aversion principle to the mix by reminding you of your streak and that you will lose it if you don’t complete your lesson. Just brilliant.

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Thanks so much for reading,

Juan Diego

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