By Meagan Matthews, BS
Do you tend to have pessimistic thoughts throughout the day? Do you wish you had a more optimistic outlook? Incorporating this one habit might be the key to unlocking a more positive headspace, and it only takes three seconds.
“The Maui Habit” was created by BJ Fogg, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Tiny Habits and founder of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab. It goes like this: as soon as your feet hit the ground in the morning, you say to yourself, “It’s going to be a great day.” This habit is named after the Hawaiian island of Maui because Dr. Fogg associates this island with positivity and optimism. Though it may sound too simple to make a big impact, Dr. Fogg and those who have implemented the habit can attest to the difference it makes.
“I find this practice helpful, even on my worst days,” says Dr. Fogg. “When I’m worried about the day ahead, this statement–even when I say it with a question in my voice–seems to open the door just a crack to actually having a good day.”
The Neuroscience of Habitual Positive Thinking
A key aspect of our ability to create new habits is neuroplasticity, which describes the brain’s ability to perceive, respond, and adapt to external cues. The adaptation stems from what many researchers refer to as an action-outcome association. If an outcome is negative, you are likely to change your action to promote a positive outcome instead. This positive outcome reinforces the new action, and over time, it becomes almost automated, or a habit.
Researchers have found that our thoughts can alter the relationship between brain physiology and its influence on our well-being. Positive thoughts are accompanied by the release of oxytocin, a “feel good” hormone that functions like a positive outcome. Once positive thinking becomes a habit, it can improve your overall self conception. A 2013 meta analysis of 39 studies found that repeated exposure to a form of positive psychological intervention improved participants’ perception of well-being.
So how effective is “The Maui Habit” on improving your outlook? Dr. Fogg says that the most effective habit is the one which “happens in the morning, is really easy to do, […] and makes you feel good.”
Practice of the Month:
Do “The Maui Habit” Every Morning for 30 Days
Step 1: Identify the cue.
Dr. Fogg recommends this be when your feet first touch the floor. Others prefer it be when they first look in the mirror. What’s important is that it works for you!
Step 2: In your mind, say the phrase: “It’s going to be a great day.”
When the day ahead seems to be particularly difficult, Dr. Fogg recommends saying, “It’s going to be a great day, somehow.”
Step 3: Pause to feel the positive emotions.
Take a moment to let the optimistic feelings resulting from the phrase really sink in, then carry on with the rest of your day!
You might be surprised by just how quickly this little phrase becomes automatic (it may only take a few days!) and how it starts to impact your overall approach to life. Dr. Fogg says, “With this morning practice, you are setting an upward trajectory for your day. Rather than spiraling downward, you can continue to lift.”
At the start of the year, thinking about all the changes you want to make in your life can be overwhelming. You might think, “I have to start walking every day, eat more vegetables, get more sleep, and start a gratitude journal.” With so many things on this list, it’s no wonder we end up feeling stressed and flopped on the couch eating potato chips and watching Netflix into the night by February.
Don’t worry, we see you. And we’re here to help. Rather than rely on willpower, Stanford behavior change expert, BJ Fogg, PhD, suggests the following steps to create and maintain a new healthy habit:
- Choose something you already want to do and enjoy doing (e.g., walking as exercise).
- Set the bar low to promote consistency (e.g., commit to walking to the end of your driveway and back every day).
- Anchor the new habit to something you already do every day (e.g., walk right after you drink your morning coffee).
- Redesign your environment to make the healthy habit more convenient (e.g., put your walking shoes by the front door).
- Set up a visual prompt (e.g., put a Post-it note on your computer to remind you to take a lunchtime walk).
- Allow yourself to feel good about any positive action you take, no matter how tiny.
Journal Prompt: What is ONE habit you’d like to create and maintain this year, and which of the above strategies will you employ to set yourself up for success?
A Different Twist on New Year’s Resolutions
At the start of the year, rather than answer the question, “What’s your New Year’s Resolution?”, Dr. Fogg invites us to contemplate the following:
Journal Prompt: What is ONE thing you can change in your home environment today that will have the BIGGEST positive impact on your health for the rest of the year?
To help spur inspiration, here are sample answers from each of the seven Lifestyle Medicine pillars:
- Movement & Exercise – Get a dog!
- Restorative Sleep – Move the television out of the bedroom.
- Stress Management – Move your cell phone out of arm’s reach from your bed to prevent late-night scrolling.
- Healthful Nutrition – Keep fruit in a bowl on the dining table for convenient healthy snacking.
- Gratitude & Purpose – Frame a photograph of someone who makes you smile and place it next to your work computer.
- Cognitive Enhancement – Place a good reading lamp beside a comfortable chair to promote nightly reading.
- Social Engagement – Schedule a weekly walk with a friend (two-for-one!).
“It’s important to remember that habit formation is a practice-and-revise process,” says Dr. Fogg. “You probably need to try out various new habits to find the ones that work for you. Think of it like trying on new shoes. If the first selection doesn’t fit you, that’s okay. Just keep going and try others. Find what works best for you.”
Forget relying on willpower—your environment can do the heavy lifting when it comes to building healthier habits. By making good behaviors easy and convenient, and bad behaviors difficult and less accessible, you can set yourself up for success without constantly battling self-control. Instead of focusing on which habits are good or bad, this approach focuses on methods and new ways of thinking to simplify healthy choices.
Think about it: Is your phone right next to your bed, tempting you to scroll at night? Is junk food or fruit sitting on your kitchen table? Are your running shoes by the door, reminding you to go for a morning jog? These small changes can make a big difference.
BJ Fogg, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Tiny Habits and founder of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, explains, “People often think, ‘I’ll just use willpower to change my bad habits,’ but that rarely works.”
“Instead of relying on willpower, we take a different approach. We redesign our environment to make healthy behaviors easy and natural, and in doing so, we transform our habits—and our lives,” says Dr. Fogg.
It’s important to recognize that our environment drives our behavior. For instance, seeing an apple on the kitchen table prompts a healthy snack, placing running shoes by the door encourages morning runs, and putting a photo of your family by the phone reminds you to call your mom.
Rather than relying on fleeting willpower to create healthy habits in 2025, invest some effort upfront to make changes in your physical surroundings. Walk into each room of your house and identify something that is prompting an unhealthy habit, such as having junk food on the kitchen table, making it easily accessible for a snack. Also, identify what you can add to that room to make a healthy habit more convenient, such as placing fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table instead.
So, how do you make good behaviors easy? Here are some examples from our expert team for things they’ve taken OUT and added IN to prompt healthy choices in each room of the house.
Make Healthy Habits Easier in the Following Rooms:
Kitchen
OUT: Throw away junk food (or put it in the back of the cupboard).
IN: Place fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table for a quick snack.
IN: Redesign fridge and cupboards to make healthy options more visible.
Living Room
OUT: Remove the TV remote from the coffee table.
IN: Add a stationary bicycle or rebounder to use while watching TV.
IN: Create a cozy reading nook with books and good lighting.
Bedroom
OUT: Take out the TV.
OUT: Charge your phone outside the bedroom.
IN: Place a glass of water on your nightstand to stay hydrated first thing in the morning.
IN: Optimize for quality sleep with blackout curtains, cool temperatures, and comfortable bedding.
Bathroom
OUT: Remove clutter from counters. Store products you don’t use daily out of sight to create a clean space.
IN: Place floss next to your toothbrush to create a visual cue for dental hygiene habits.
Office
OUT: Remove snacks that encourage mindless eating.
IN: Set a timer every hour and keep weights or resistance bands within sight to prompt quick exercise breaks.
IN: Consider adding a standing desk or treadmill to encourage movement.
Making these small changes to your environment in January sets you up for success to lead a healthier lifestyle all year!
If you’ve already given up on your New Year’s resolutions, you’re not alone. Studies show that 88 percent of resolutions are broken within the first two weeks of January, and 95 percent are abandoned by the end of the month. Many people start a protocol on January 1st, stick with it for a couple of weeks, but then drop off and feel like a failure.
Stanford behavior change expert BJ Fogg, PhD, shows us a different way. “Research shows that relying on willpower is not how behavior change works,” says Dr. Fogg, founder of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab. Rather than give up on your health goals after you (inevitably) get off track, Dr. Fogg recommends trying a few of the following strategies to help make your new healthy habits last.
1. Help Yourself Do What You Already Want to Do
Everyone has a part of them that wants to eat healthy and exercise and another part that wants to eat junk food and sit on the couch. We have conflicting motivations. So how can we help the part of ourselves that wants to eat healthy and exercise? Dr. Fogg recommends choosing a healthy habit that you already enjoy doing.
“If you don’t like running, don’t have ‘go for a run every morning’ as your new year’s resolution. There are a hundred other ways to be active, so pick something you already enjoy,” says Dr. Fogg.
It may be helpful to reflect on which healthy habits would work for you in a sustainable way and write down behaviors you already enjoy doing. For example, if walking on a treadmill doesn’t work for you, try walking in nature. Or if you’re not a morning person, don’t set your alarm for 5 a.m. to workout; instead plan to exercise at the end of your workday.
“Most protocols, such as strict diets, don’t work long term because they are too prescriptive,” says Dr. Fogg. “When it comes to behavior change, one size does not fit all. A new habit only sticks when it makes sense at the individual level.”
2. Set the Bar Low
The best way to create a lasting habit is to set the bar low so that you can be consistent with it every day. For example, if you want to start jogging, commit to putting on your running shoes and walking to the end of your driveway and back. If you feel overwhelmed about cleaning your house, commit to tidying up just one piece of furniture every night before bed. If you’re not motivated to floss your teeth, commit to flossing just one tooth. It might sound silly, but making the habit small lowers the amount of motivation required to complete the behavior. With consistency, the behavior becomes a habit that eventually becomes part of your automatic daily routine.
“The key is making the habit so small that you can do it even when you’re sick, busy, preoccupied, or just low motivation,” says Dr. Fogg, explaining the habit-forming technique from his bestselling book, Tiny Habits. “Let’s say the new habit is flossing. You don’t have to stop at one tooth; you can always do more if you feel like it, but it’s not necessary to feel successful. Simply put, you have a minimal habit that you do every day, and when you want to do more, then you do more.”
3. Positive Emotions Create the Habit
It’s important to recognize that habits are created when we feel successful, so the key is to make the feeling of success easier to attain (see Tip #2). As we are on our habit-forming journey, Dr. Fogg encourages us to feel proud of ourselves even for the tiniest of successes because when we feel good about a new habit, we will become more motivated to keep doing it—and eventually, willpower is out of the picture entirely.
“Most people are so hard on themselves, and they use guilt and shame to establish new habits, but that doesn’t work,” says Dr. Fogg. “They think that identifying their short comings rather than their successes will help motivate them. What works better is finding every excuse to seeing you’re doing a good job so that you continue doing the new habit.”
Also, many of us have heard that it takes 28 days to establish a new habit, however, this theory has been debunked. Dr. Fogg says that if we feel successful at a deep and authentic level, even for the tiny version of the behavior, the habit can form at a much faster rate.
4. Anchor Your New Habit to an Existing Habit
If there’s a habit that you already do every day (I see you, coffee drinkers), you can anchor your new habit to the original one. Dr. Fogg calls this “anchoring” because you’re tying a new habit to something already stable in your life. This technique has also been referred to as “habit stacking”.
Regardless of what you call it, this is what you do. Identify something you already do automatically and then perform the new habit afterward. Here are some examples:
After I make my coffee, I meditate
After I turn on the faucet for my nightly bath, I floss my teeth
After I press “start” on the microwave to heat my lunch, I do 20 jumping jacks and 20 squats
After I turn on the television when I’m done with work, I hop on a stationary bike
Write down a few of the habits you already do automatically and see if you can anchor a new habit after them. The anchoring technique provides a great way to incorporate many new habits simultaneously into your daily routine.
5. Try to Change Together, Not Alone
We’ve all heard of the concept of “accountability buddies,” but Dr. Fogg says this strategy actually works. So, if you have a friend with the same health goals as you, it would be wise to sync up your efforts. For example, if you want to walk for 30 minutes daily, finding a friend to walk with can help you both become consistent. Also, since we now know that positive emotions help establish new habits, try and find a walking companion who adds laughter or interesting conversations to the experience so that you associate walking with feeling good.
Also, Dr. Fogg explains that changing together is especially important in certain domains, such as sleep (i.e., going to bed and waking up at the same time as your bed partner), nutrition (i.e., eating similar meals with other members of your household), and media use (i.e., how much television you and your family watches every night).
“We can change alone, with a friend or partner, or even with a group,” says Dr. Fogg. “If you want to change as a household, I invite you to hold a family meeting to discuss one behavior change the entire family can agree on for the entire year. Changing with others can make establishing new habits easier and potentially even fun.”
Millions of Americans share a similar experience every morning. The alarm goes off, but they’ve already been awake for hours in bed. They hit the snooze button to squeeze in a few more minutes of precious rest, not realizing they were making their sleep problems worse.
“Hitting the snooze button is one of the worst things you can do because it prolongs morning grogginess and associates the bed with being awake,” says Fiona Barwick, PhD, DBSM, Stanford Clinical Associate Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences – Sleep Medicine. “Rather than hitting snooze, it’s important to get out of bed within 15 minutes of the alarm going off and get some natural light to stop melatonin production.”
You may not think that something you do first thing in the morning will affect your sleep that night; however, Dr. Barwick says that the behaviors we engage with throughout the day can impact the quality of our sleep at night.
“Getting a good night’s sleep is a 24-hour endeavor,” says Dr. Barwick.
How Does Sleep Work?
According to Dr. Barwick, we fall asleep when these three biological systems are in working order:
- Circadian Rhythm (CR)
- Sleep Drive (SD)
- Stress Management (SM)
Here is a list of behaviors that can negatively affect the three systems (CR, SD, SM), as well as alternative behaviors that have a more positive impact:
Since it may be difficult to change all the behaviors in this table, Dr. Barwick shares the top two behaviors that are most important for each system:
- Circadian Rhythm
- Sleeping in the right window for your body clock (e.g., 10pm – 6am, 11pm – 7am, or 12am – 8am, etc.) and staying consistent with those sleep and wake times.
- Appropriate exposure to light and darkness to sync the release of melatonin with wake and sleep times (e.g., getting morning sunlight, not looking at screens one hour before bed, and making sure the bedroom is dark).
- Sleep Drive
- Increase sleep drive by tiring the body with regular physical exercise and outdoor light exposure.
- Getting out of bed promptly (no hitting the snooze button) and making sure you spend the appropriate amount of time in bed (anywhere from 6-10 hours depending on your individual genetics and age).
- Stress Management
- Physical relaxation—Deep breathing throughout the day to relax the body.
- Mental/Emotional relaxation—mindfulness meditation or journaling to process emotions before going to bed.
Practice of the Month:
Avoid hitting snooze (i.e., get out of bed when the alarm goes off) and create morning, midday, and evening routines to optimize the three key systems for sleep.
From the table above, write two behaviors you can do in the morning, midday, and at night. Make sure that you’re addressing all three systems (CR, SD, and SM).
What to do in the morning for good sleep:
1)
2)
What to do during the day for good sleep:
1)
2)
What to do at night for good sleep:
1)
2)
Here is a sample:
What to do in the morning for good sleep:
1) Put phone out of arm’s reach and get out of bed right after alarm goes off (CR, SD).
2) Go for a walk around the block, then eat breakfast (CR, SD).
What to do during the day for good sleep:
1) Stress reduction: do a 10-minute mindfulness meditation at lunch (SM).
2) Physical exercise: do a 45-minute workout right after work (SD, SM).
What to do at night for good sleep:
1) Turn off all screens one hour before bed and write in my journal while listening to relaxing music (CR, SM).
2) Take a luxurious candle-lit bubble bath while taking deep breaths and counting my blessings (CR, SM).
“These are behaviors we can do to increase the likelihood of getting better sleep, but there may be times when we do everything right and still not sleep well,” says Dr. Barwick. “The most important thing to remember is that we will be fine the next day. We are evolutionarily adapted to deal with insufficient sleep, and we can still do what we need to get done, even without the full amount of sleep that we normally get.”