There are two routes I recognize by which you can build a lasting habit. One is a habit loop described in Charles Duhigg's book "The Power of Habit". I found it mentioned in a few other books, blog posts and literature.

The other one is much less known. Aside from my own ruminations I found it only on James Clear’s blog. This path involves identity habits.

I also know of a couple of rarely-mentioned enhancements that work nicely with both methods.

I. The habit loop.

This is the core of Dughill's message which is based on a vast amount of brain research done over the last few decades.

A habit consists of the cue, routine and reward. Those three elements are stored in your brain as one unit. You get the signal to perform your habit, you perform it and then comes the reward that finishes the loop.

This approach is the foundation of a number of coaching programs and habit development models (mini habits, tiny habits and more). It's a great way to build small habits and, better yet, to build physical habits, like exercising, drinking water, eating the right kind of food, etc. Those activities are ingrained into your body, so this mind to body connection (a loop in your brain) facilitates the process of habit development.

I don't necessarily agree with the last piece of this model  being referred to as a "reward". I think researchers misnamed it because they were biased by the experiments they performed.

In their brain research, they were experimenting on laboratory rats. They trained them to find a way to a piece of chocolate in the labyrinth. After some time, the animals were habitually finding the way to the treat. The taste of chocolate was closing the loop and completing the habit in their brain. If they didn't find the chocolate, they were confused because the loop in their brains was still active.

Well, we are not rats, life is not a labyrinth and chocolate is evil (surely for me, with my sweet tooth).

However, my experience suggests that you don't need a reward at the end of the loop, you just need a clear endpoint.

Endpoint

The habit loop approach is also great for developing a habit when your life (or just part of your day) is highly structured. For example, I developed several habits which are cued by my commute to and from work.

While I wait for a suburban train, I meditate for a few minutes. The cue for my meditation habit is arriving on the train platform, the routine is my meditation  and the "reward" (you see how inappropriate the name is in this context? Let's call it an endpoint from now on) is arrival of the train.

When I transfer between suburban and subway trains, I repeat my personal mission statement in my head. Cue: stepping off the suburban train. Routine: repeating my personal mission statement. Endpoint: arriving on a subway train platform.

The way to the office by subway takes me almost exactly ten minutes. On the way to work I read a book written by a saint. On a way back home I practice speed reading. The cues are finding a place in a subway train. The endpoints are arrivals to the destinations.

I haven't mentioned even half the habits coupled with my daily commute. Every time your schedule is highly structured, you have a great opportunity to build your habits via the habit loop method.

I have also a whole stack of habits I do right after waking up and when preparing for sleep in the evening. Waking up and going to sleep are other habits ingrained in your life for good and you can build upon them.

Developing a habit

The actual habit development is amazingly simplistic. You design your behavior using cue-routine-endpoint system and then perform according to your design. Anchoring your cue to an existing habit can be very efficient.

Several examples from Tiny Habits course:

"After I brush, I will floss one tooth."

"After I pour my morning coffee, I will text my mom.”

"After I start the dishwasher, I will read one sentence from a book.”

“After I walk in my door from work, I will get out my workout clothes.”

“After I sit down on the train, I will open my sketch notebook.”

"After I hear any phone ring, I will exhale and relax for 2 seconds.”

“After I put my head on the pillow, I will think of one good thing from my day.”

“After I arrive home, I will hang my keys up by the door.”

II. Identity habits.

In case of these habits, you don't need to be so meticulous about the tiny details; you perform them because you are a person who does such things, no matter what. For example, I am a writer. I have a habit of writing 1,000 words a day. Nevertheless, scientists from MIT could study me for months and wouldn’t uncover any consistent circumstances or existing loop that trigger my writing activity.

I write in every possible circumstance—at home, at work, on trains, waiting for trains, on the bench at a park...

I usually write in English, but sometimes in Polish.

You might find me writing at any hour—early in the morning before work, during my commute to/ from work, during the day (yes, at the office), or late in the evening when everybody sleeps. I generally write on my laptop, but sometimes I write by hand, and I write for several different audiences. I write short eBooks, blog posts, Quora answers, articles to magazines, philosophical ruminations, and I’m also writing a novel.

I write because I identify myself as a writer, not because circumstance and routine triggers an electrical impulse in the reptilian part of my brain.

A scientific gaping hole

I'm not that kind of guy who researches for and reads scientific papers as a hobby. I found, however, that if you are interested in a subject, you will stumble on some research regarding it sooner or later, especially in popular publications, printed or online (like Huffington Post where they translate eggheads' talk into plain actionable English. ;)

But I've never found anything about identity habits, which I believe is a huge omission.

It's nice to build a habit of drinking a glass of water first thing in the morning, but do you really need a habit loop for that? I think a habit like doing 30+ consecutive pullups or writing 1,000 words a day is more interesting for most of us and such habits are much more easily developed via the identity habits route.

How does one develop a new identity?

It starts in your head. Who do you think you are? A son, daughter, mother or father? Do you identify with your occupation or nationality? Whatever your answers are, try to think about why you identify with those labels.

Why do you consider yourself this or that? What conditions do you need to meet to keep that identity?

I am a writer.

I needed just a single thought to sneak into my conscious mind to start identifying with this name. When that happened it wasn't even a dream, it was a wish. I had no experience nor skills. Until that moment in time, I had written only school assignments (including my Masters' thesis), one short story as a teenager and a lot of stuff on online forums, none of which had a literary focus. Today I have more than a million words under my belt.

Once the thought of becoming a writer had entered  my head I couldn't get rid of it. I started researching what "being a writer" means. I found the definition that spoke to me: writers write. So I started to write.

Doing is the ultimate test of your new identity.

Decide on something, then start to execute upon it. If you can persist and can do that without overusing your willpower, you've found the right identity.

If you fail, seriously reconsider your position. Maybe you've just followed someone else's dream?

Identity equals drive. If you are a son or a mother, you simply cannot imagine your life without this identity. That's why the identity approach is so useful in developing habits. You will do whatever is necessary to keep your identity. You will do it every day.

III. Habits tools.

There are a lot of hacks and tricks involved in developing habits, but most are dependent upon your personality. Some of us are motivated by feedback from peers, whereas you might hate it if you feel forced to do something. Some need to know the why and how behind each step, you might take everything at face value and just try to do your best. For tips and tricks, I recommend the most comprehensive book on habits "Better than Before" by Gretchen Rubin.

I also found two more not-very-well-known "tools" which I think are good for both loop and identity habits. These tools are the secret weapons that can help you develop any habit.

It's possible that there may be cases in which they are not helpful, . However, I have built a few dozen habits, from drinking a glass of water to keeping three gratitude diaries, and these tools helped me with every single of them.

1. Tracking.

I don't agree with those who claim that tracking is limiting and cripples your chances to develop new habit. The argument against it is that tracking constricts a person, making them feel like a prisoner or a laboratory rat under scrutiny.

In my experience tracking is pure gold in habit creation and is a factor that can make or break your habit. Without tracking, the chances for habit development reduce drastically.

If you keep everything in your head, your subconscious can trick you into believing you are achieving your goals, or even that you don't need the habit you are trying to form. It can twist everything and sell you a bunch of distortions mixed with a little truth to make them believable. And you will buy these packages each and every time.

So, what is habit tracking?

In its simplest form, you are just recording whether you have done your habit or not. The means you use to record this is absolutely up to you. You may use pen and paper, an Excel sheet, a text file, an application, a wall calendar- anything.

Tracking in the form of a journal is widely known and recommended by many researchers and coaches. Journals are used in many areas: a writing log, food journal, exercise log and so on. They are recommended, because they work.

It works like magic

In 2012 I lost about 15 pounds. It took me several months and I used various methods, from ditching sweets, intermittent fasting and introducing more vegetables into my diet, to intensifying my exercise program. But my progress stalled in December. At the beginning of January 2013, I started a food journal. I registered everything I consumed, every gulp of soda and crumb of bread. I didn't change my exercise program. I didn't change my diet. I just noted down my consumption.

My awareness with regard to the amount and quality of food I ate increased almost magically. And I lost those last six stubborn pounds.

My story is not some aberration. Journaling, and tracking in general, works because it immensely increases your awareness. It instills filters in your brain. We get about 100 million sensual impulses every second -- this is gigabytes of data. Your conscious mind perceives only a small fraction of that info ocean. Tracking creates additional filters that redirect a portion of this vast amount of data to your conscious mind. Your attention determines what you become conscious about.

Filters in your brain

When I was keeping my food journal, I carried sticky notes and a pen with me. Immediately after consumption, I noted down what I ate and drank. When I arrived at my computer, I copied those notes into a text file. Keeping records  on sticky notes felt weird to me, so I trained myself to remember what I ate and, once I reached a computer, I dumped this information from my head into the file. I did that at first after each meal, then a few times a day, and finally I was able to keep in my head everything I ate on any given day and note it down in the file during a single session in the evening.

I kept my food journal for about 9 weeks and ditched this habit around 10th of March 2013. But today I can still recall everything I've consumed from the moment I wake up till the moment I go to bed.

As an example, today I ate an orange, five small slices of wholegrain bread with cheese, a peach, lunch (one pickle, some cabbage soup and a sauce with chicken meat), three more slices of bread with cheese and four slices of bread with jam. I drank two glasses of chicory coffee with a spoon of honey and a glass of coffee, all of them with milk.

I have filters in my brain that register my consumption. They work in the background. I don't need a conscious effort to remember what I eat. Whenever I want to recall my consumption, that data is "at hand". But don't ask me what I ate yesterday. I need to refer to the normal memory routine to get to that data.

So, if you track your habit, the attention of both your conscious and subconscious mind focuses on this activity. Your chances of success rise exponentially.

Data

The second biggest advantage of tracking is tangible data for analysis. We are so prone to lie to ourselves! When you keep everything in your head, fantasy and illusion are mixed up with the facts. You can justify any action: "Oh well, a cup of ice cream will not do much damage. It's so yummy, and you deserve a treat because you didn't eat much today anyway." Or: "C'mon treat yourself, you will burn it tomorrow in the morning workout."

If you don't know how much you ate or how many calories your average workout burns, such "arguments" from your subconscious seem logical and convincing. If you possess such data, your subconscious cannot pull most dirty tricks on you.

Tracking/ developing a habit balance

The more comprehensive your tracking is, the more data you collect and the harder it is to cheat yourself  I just tracked everything caloric that went into my mouth, but food journals may be more elaborate than that. You might track the number of calories, time of meals, your moods, and many more details.

Of course, the more comprehensive is your tracking, the more burdensome it is to keep. It's so much easier to mark a habit once a day in a tracking application than writing down what you ate, where you ate it, how long it took you and in what mood you were in.

I consider tracking an integral part of habit development. I don't start a habit without a parallel discipline of tracking and/ or measuring this habit.

Data driven analysis example

When I decided to overcome my shyness, it was tracking that saved me and ultimately helped me to succeed. My subconscious mind used the normal arsenal of tricks to discourage me from my new habit. It was sending soothing messages: "Don't worry, it's not that bad, you will do it next time, take it easy, it's not worth it anyway, this talking to strangers is really terrifying."

If not for my tracking, I would have believed those messages. But, several weeks into my habit, I took the sheets of paper I had been keeping my tracking on and I compared the habit of talking to strangers with other habits I started about the same time; a dozen or so. I had more minuses in case of talking to strangers, than in all other habits together.

Only then I really realized the real scope of my problem with introversion and changed my strategy. I downsized the habit at the beginning to simply making eye contact, later I started smiling to strangers and finally I began talking to them.

Thanks to tracking I didn't let my habit slip into the abyss of failure, where most New Year’s resolutions finish.

2. Streaks.

The scientist I mentioned before, BJ Fogg, designed a model that describes change in human behavior. In order get a behavior you need to have motivation, ability and a trigger (cue).

The cue is the simplest part of that model. The best idea is to make an established habit a cue for the new one.

Ability is not so complicated either. Your knowledge and/ or experience in a given area equates to your ability. No magical stuff, just sweat, tears and hustle.

Motivation seems to be the most difficult part and that's where streaks come into play.

The practice of building streaks—habits continuously maintained for a series of days— is well known. Jerry Seinfeld’s habit of coming up with a new joke every day and marking this fact on his wall calendar serves as an example. The motivational technique of streaks is also called "don't break up a chain".

We know about streaks, but we don't practice them often enough.

Why do they work?

One aspect that is widely discussed is loss aversion. When you build a habit over days, weeks and months, you feel that not doing your habit the next day will "lose" you the time and effort investment you made so far. A wall calendar, or any other tracking tool, serves as a visual reminder of that.

From my own experience I can say that you draw confidence and self-esteem from building your streaks. I've written for at least 30 minutes every day for the last 913 days. Very few people can say that about themselves. I have this illusory feeling of being part of a special group. Well, I suppose there are some folks who wrote every day for the last 1,000 days. But how many of them also did pullups for the last 858 days and kept a journal for the last 727 days?

This is the effect of gamification. We score "points" to feel better about ourselves. Maintaining your self-esteem is a powerful motivator.

Data driven confirmation

It's not only my opinion. Coach.me is a project with a mission to help anyone achieve any goal. They used BJ Fogg's model to design their application and built a community around it. They have millions of users and their data analysis confirmed that the streak approach works. Coach.me CEO, Tony Stubblebine, in explaining their philosophy put it aptly:

"One heroic week from you isn’t going to change your life, you need practices that you can keep up."

A foundation

Streaks have also one additional attribute which is unrecognized or taken for granted. In either case, I've never found it articulated: they solidify your habits.

If you maintain a streak of a daily habit, you do your routine more often and more regularly. It's especially important in the initial phase of forming your habit. If you don't track and have no visual reminder how far you are into your streak, you are more likely to skip your discipline on a given day and more prone to discouragement. An erratic manner of performing your routine for "one heroic week" doesn't support habit development or its sustainability.

The last advantage of streaks is also highly undervalued:

You identify with them

I have well over 30 daily habits. That's too much. Taking into account how insanely busy is my life with a day job, family and church responsibilities and a side hustle (writing), I cannot maintain all my streaks perfectly.

Recently the stress has taken its toll. I broke my streak of reviewing my personal mission statement after 800 days. After well over 500 days, I didn't study the Bible one day. I maintained my streak for 899 days only to forget about doing a pushups series one day. I love to read works written by saints, yet I missed a day after maintaining 800+ day streak.

It doesn't matter. My habits are ingrained into my days and into the core of who I am. In the last 914 days I reviewed my personal mission statement 911 times, I did my pushups 910 times and read saints' work 913 times. An occasional hiccup means nothing. My streaks helped me to build my habits to the point where they are me.

IV. FRAMEWORK

How to build a habit then? Here is the framework I used with success to develop dozens of habits:

Decide what habit do you want.

Be specific. Design it. How often? When? Where? What will you do? How many repetitions? For how long?

Perform your discipline at least once a day.

Weekly and monthly habits have their place too, but if you cannot build and maintain a daily habit, a weekly one will be a nightmare to develop. Learn the art of habit development in the most efficient way, via daily activity, and only then start more ambitious projects.

Track your habit daily.

"You can’t change what you don’t measure." — Tony Stubblebine

That's exactly my experience. When I measure my habits, when I track them, the process of habit development is smooth and efficient (well, compared to NOT tracking, of course). Make sure that the tracking method you choose serves its purpose, but doesn't become an end unto itself. You shouldn't spend too much time and attention on tracking. Remember what your main goal is: building a new habit.

Build streaks.

They will help you with your motivation like nothing else. In the end, they will integrate your habits into your personality. You will not be able NOT to perform your disciplines.

Continuous tracking is your feedback loop. Your habit is not set in stone.

I did a single series of consecutive pushups for years. First I struggled with consistency, so I coupled this activity with my morning prayer. That instantly helped.

Then I modified this habit and started doing various pushups; my workout started to be more interesting, I had more records to beat (diamond, legs-elevated, wide-grip pushups etc.) and I used less time for exercises (doing 100 pushups takes several minutes). I became so strong, that even the most difficult kind of pushups took me several minutes.

Then I switched to pullups. I can do quite a lot of them, but I can't do them for longer than two minutes. This is my ideal workout.

This habit morphed throughout the years, but the underpinning stayed the same: I couple my morning prayer with it; it's very short and very intensive; I can track the number of repetitions and motivate myself by beating records.

The purpose behind the habit stayed the same and it's still fulfilled: to train my mind, body and soul first thing in the morning.

The challenge

I declare that it's impossible to fail using my framework. I have never failed using it. I've quit on many good habits and I've been doing some in an erratic manner, but only when I missed at least one framework element: conscious design, doing it daily, tracking, building a streak. Using them all I'm invincible.

Try it and give me your feedback. Maybe we can improve it even more?