Something becomes a habit when the action becomes automatic. Here’s how to apply psychological principles to develop new and healthy habits.

For many, developing healthy habits, such as cooking nutritious meals most nights, going to the gym before work, or reading before bed, seems like an intimidating goal.

Each time you try to start a new habit, you may find that you simply can’t keep it up for more than a day or 2. The mental labor that it takes to motivate yourself to engage in a healthy activity may feel overwhelming and unsustainable.

Forming new habits isn’t easy because you are accustomed to your old, often contradicting, ones. However, using psychological tricks can help you overcome the initial challenges of changing your ways to turn a goal into an automatic impulse. Here’s what psychology experts say are the best ways to get started.

Habits are actions we do without thinking, often because something in our environment reminds us to do them. Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Duhigg explains that habits follow a cycle: cue, routine, and reward. Here’s how it works:

First, something triggers the habit, like feeling stressed at work. Then, we follow our routine, such as grabbing a bag of potato chips to snack on. Afterward, we might notice that we feel less stressed and more satisfied.

Over time, you start to connect stress with potato chips. Whenever you feel stressed, you might crave chips or other salty snacks because your brain remembers the positive feeling you had before.

Before you know it, you’ve developed a habit of eating potato chips whenever work stresses you out. So, how can we change our habits?

Developing habits that benefit your long-term health and well-being can take time. Here’s how to get started.

Start small and build gradually

One important way to build sustainable habits is to start with a small goal. Even if you would like to work out for 3 hours per week in the long term, research has found that starting with an easy goal and then building gradually is what makes you most likely to achieve it and stick to it.

In other words, the first few steps should be ones that you know you can achieve. For example, if you’d like to exercise more regularly, this may mean starting by doing 10 jumping jacks or going for a 10-minute walk 3 days a week.

Make SMART goals

“SMART” is an acronym. A SMART goal is one that is:

  • specific
  • measurable
  • achievable
  • relevant
  • time-bound

The idea of a SMART goal is to get as specific as possible about the goal you are trying to achieve. Research has found that goal-setting, when it is SMART, can help people change their behaviors.

If we continue with the example above of wanting to work out on a consistent basis, a SMART goal might look like this:

  • I want to go to the gym for 3 hours each week.
  • I want to achieve this goal in a 12-week time frame.
  • Each week, I will add 10 minutes to my exercise time.

Be as consistent as possible

To make a goal turn into a habit, it’s also helpful to be as consistent as possible, such as going to the gym at the same time each day and leaving your workout clothes out the night before. The benefit of consistency is that it reinforces the habit loop (cue, routine, reward).

Therefore, when you wake up, you’re slowly creating a cue that signals it’s time to go to the gym. This leads to the reward of starting your morning feeling accomplished and energized. Over time, this will turn into a habit.

Monitor your progress

Another tool for establishing new habits is tracking your progress. No matter what your goal is, there is likely an app to help you track it. This might involve counting your steps, the number of pages you’ve read, the mileage you’ve walked, the hours you’ve slept, and so on.

Whatever habit you’re trying to form, tracking it can help hold you accountable and motivate you. When you know you’re improving, it can feel much easier to continue on.

Use your environment

Make sure that your environment assists you in achieving your goals instead of holding you back. Research suggests that to make a goal a habit, it can help to remove reminders of old habits from your environment and replace them with cues of the habit you are trying to form.

This might mean clearing out the pantry and throwing away the junk food, asking your spouse to join you in your routine changes, or creating an exercise space in your home. Whatever your goal, creating an environment that feels supportive is essential to developing new habits.

Developing new habits can take time, so it’s important you are patient with yourself and practice self-compassion. You don’t need to be perfect all the time to develop healthy and sustainable habits, such as exercising, eating nutritious foods, or replacing screen time with more enriching activities.

The best thing you can do to establish a habit is to start small and then build up, get as specific as you can in goal-setting, track your progress, create an environment that supports your goals, and stay consistent, even when there are setbacks. Confidence in yourself is a major part of habit formation, so trust that you can do this!