Do you want to be more active in 2026? Scroll less? Eat more fiber?
If you’ve made a New Year’s resolution like one of these, you’re not alone. Nearly 50% of Americans do the same each year. However, by the time February rolls around, only 25% of us are still committed to them.
So how do we build life-changing habits — and actually get them to stick around longer than a few weeks?
That’s what we — Raj Punjabi-Johnson and Noah Michelson, the hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked Wendy Wood, a behavioral scientist, researcher, and author of “Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes Stick,” when she dropped by our studio.
Press play to listen to the full episode:
“If you want to start a new habit, the best thing to do is to make it easy — easy to do the new behavior, and hard to do the behavior you’re trying to change,” Wood told us.
So, for instance, if you’re attempting to read more before bed instead of watching TikTok, you should start by removing any obstacles to your success.
“What research suggests is that you should take your cellphone out of [your bedroom] — maybe have a basket and put it in your kitchen, so you can hear it ring, [but] you’re not worried about it,” Wood offered. “You’ll need an alarm clock, obviously, [and then you’re in your room with] a book there and you have a reading light that works and doesn’t keep your partner awake. So these are all things that you sort of have to think about beforehand.”
By gathering all of the components you need to concentrate on the habit you’re trying to grow and eliminating any distractions that might keep you from achieving it, you’re setting yourself up to win.
Another tool in Wood’s tool kit is finding a reward that makes you want to continue doing the habit.
“In this case, the reward would be reading a really good book that makes you feel good while you’re reading it, and then also gets you out of that endless scroll habit,” she said. “There’s also all kinds of rewards associated with getting your phone out of your bedroom.”
Wood revealed she began a habit of using her treadmill several times a week by rewarding herself with an episode of a reality TV food competition while she is working out.
Everyone’s reward(s) will be different, but the goal is to choose something that will make you want to do whatever habit you’ve chosen.
Wood also noted that forming a habit shouldn’t involve struggling.
“When we’ve observed people who are really good at beating their goals and are very efficient at living their lives, they’re not struggling to do it,” she said.
“They’re not thinking all the time, ‘Oh, I wish I was scrolling TikTok,’ or whatever. Instead, they have formed these habits that just focus them on one behavior — the one that is working for them, the good habit at that point — and they don’t think about anything further. There’s not a struggle. It’s not a white knuckle thing, which is why you want to make the whole experience easy.”
In fact, Wood cautions that “as soon as you start struggling, you know that you’re not building a habit.”
Part of the problem might be trying to achieve a wide-ranging goal rather than focusing on a discrete, specific behavior.
“Habits are not like these broad things like, “I want to lose weight. So I’m going to have a weight loss habit,” she said. “That just doesn’t even make sense. Instead, it’s a specific behavior. You’re trying to add more fruit and vegetables into your meals. You’re trying to eat smaller portions. You’re trying not to snack. Those are specific behaviors.”
That’s why so many New Year’s resolutions fail.
“When we set New Year’s resolutions, we sometimes do it at this really high level that doesn’t map on to any particular behavior,” Wood explained. “And then you get yourself in trouble because you don’t really have a thing to focus on, and you don’t have something to plan.”
Ultimately, making it easy to do your chosen behavior and giving yourself a reward for doing it are the two most important steps in forming and maintaining whatever habits you’re trying to introduce into your life.
“When research started to point to those two things in particular, I thought, ‘This is kind of simple. And it’s going to seem so obvious to people, they’re going to say, you studied for so long to figure this out,’” Wood said. “The way we [typically] try to change our behavior is we struggle. So it actually is a very basic insight that people didn’t have before habit research made it clear how to best change unwanted behaviors. So yes, [the steps] are ridiculously simple. Your mother probably would have told you the same thing, but instead we’re doing all the wrong things.”
Listen to the full episode above or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also watch the full episode on YouTube.
Have a question or need some help with something you’ve been doing wrong? Email us at AmIDoingItWrong@HuffPost.com, and we might investigate the topic in an upcoming episode.
