What's a Giggle Step?
When I give talks, I always tell a story told by Stanford University behavioral psychologist, B.J. Fogg, who is head of Stanford’s Persuasion Technology Lab. BJ Fogg "has been studying behavior change for more than two decades. He is an expert in how to create habits.” (And you can thank him for helping Facebook, Twitter and Google do that. Or not…”)
Fogg says there are three main steps to create a habit:
1. Pick the new habit you want.
2. Pick an easy first step toward that new habit.
3. Attach the new habit to one you already have.
The BJ Fogg story I tell is about how he got himself to floss his teeth every night.
We all know how important flossing is to our heath. And yet…while many of us try over and over to do it, we don’t.
Crazy, no? Our Rational Brain knows all the very important health reasons why we should floss our teeth.
But our Emotional Brain seems to stop us at every turn. We forget. We think about doing it and then have a strong case of the “I don’t wanna’s.” Etc. Etc.
Why???
How BJ Fogg got himself to floss his teeth every day tells us why:
He told himself:
“After I finish brushing my teeth, I will floss ONE tooth.”
OK, did that make you giggle?
Every time I tell this story, the audience giggles. Pretty funny isn’t it? Like, who only flosses one tooth?!
But you know what? Starting with a Giggle Step like that is key to stopping a Bad Habit—and replacing it with a Good Habit—one that is a permanent, automatic, “takes-no-thought,” habit. When it’s like that, it truly is Easy Effortless Fun.
Most importantly, it becomes a habit you can keep up even when all hell breaks loose in your life.
Because if you don’t design for that, you’ll stop your new habit at the first sign of Rational Brain oxygen-draining Cortisol coursing through your body. Meaning, you’ll fail at your new habit when you get stressed.
Giggle Steps Are Much, Much Smaller Than "Baby Steps."
Conventional Wisdom says you need to do Baby Steps when learning a new habit.
But…just about every Baby Step I’ve ever heard of is way too big—that is, too big for the Emotional Brain, especially if you have a Scaredy-Cat Brain with a low Threat Response threshold like I have.
Oh sure, your Rational Brain thinks even big steps are a piece of cake.
To the Rational Brain it makes sense to floss all your teeth every night. It’s not hard to do and it takes very little time. So when you don’t, your Rational Brain beats you up, yelling, “What’s your problem, you idiot?!”
But your Rational Brain beating you up feels like pain and danger to your Emotional Brain so it yells at you, “Ow! Ow! Ow! That hurts!”
To escape that pain, your Emotional Brain gets you to “Fight or Flight or Freeze or Forget” with a shot of the feel-bad brain chemical, Cortisol. It causes the “I don’t wanna” response, too, as well as the “Forget” response.
Forgetting is a particularly powerful way the Emotional Brain can keep you from doing things it feels are painful and dangerous for you to do.
What? Flossing your teeth every night is painful and dangerous?
Well, the Emotional Brain is always in the present. It can’t look to the future and plan. That’s the Rational Brain’s job.
Anything that’s new (even something that’s good for you) can be a threat to your Emotional Brain. It can be scared of any change—even a good change.
You can’t reason with the Emotional Brain. That’s what everyone tries to do. But the Emotional Brain and the Rational Brain do different things. Using rational logic to get your Emotional Brain to feel safe doesn’t work.
When you do a new habit right after you do a well-established habit you already have (say right after you brush your teeth) and you repeat it daily for a long enough time*, it will feel weird when you don’t do both habits in sequence.
Get your brain used to predicting that every time you brush your teeth you then floss your teeth, then if you miss it, it will tell you by making you feel weird.
Feeling weird means your new habit has become normal and expected by the brain. And now you have your brain helping you stick with the new habit.
Bottom line: If you want to start a new habit, figure out a way to do it every single day in connection with something that is already a daily habit of yours.