Building good habits and breaking bad habits isn't easy, especially since we only have a limited supply of willpower. However, there is one thing you can do to make the process of building new habits easier known as the "20 Second Rule,” which is a simple method that comes from Harvard happiness researcher Shawn Achor.
In his book “The Happiness Advantage,” Achor talks about how he wanted to make practicing guitar a daily habit. However, he couldn’t motivate himself to do it, no matter how hard he tried.
Achor says, "The guitar was sitting in the closet, a mere 20 seconds away, but I couldn’t make myself take it out and play it. What had gone wrong?”
Achor knew that playing the guitar on a daily basis would make him happier, but the 20 seconds of effort it took to remove his guitar from the closet and return to the living room proved to be a major mental barrier.
20 seconds of annoyance was all it took for Shawn to convince himself that the benefits of playing guitar were not worth the effort.
But Achor came up with a simple solution. What did he do? He removed the 20 seconds of effort that was keeping him from picking up his guitar.
He bought a $2 stand, moved the guitar from the closet to the living room, and moved his guitar so that it would be in immediate reach instead of 20 seconds away. Three weeks later, he had practiced 21 days in a row.
Achor says,
"What I had done here, essentially, was put the desired behavior on the path of least resistance, so it actually took less energy and effort to pick up and practice the guitar than to avoid it. I like to refer to this as the 20 Second Rule, because lowering the barrier to change by just 20 seconds was all it took to help me form a new life habit.”
This is important to understand because although activities like playing the guitar are often more enjoyable than scrolling through Facebook, they almost always require more initial effort, such as taking the guitar out and tuning it. This is known as “activation energy,” which Achor explains as the necessary energy you need to kickstart a positive habit.
It’s no secret change is hard, but by understanding activation energy, we can replace negative behaviors with better ones by simply using the 20 Second Rule.
Just remember that all you need to do is decrease the activation energy you need to do positive habits and increase the activation energy to curb negative habits.
If you’d like to minimize the number of hours you spend on social media, for example, delete all of the social media apps on your phone so that if you want to go online you have to download the app and manually login.
If you want to eat more healthily, prepare healthy lunch and dinner meals in advance.
If you want to watch less television, take the batteries out of the remote control, and put them somewhere far away from you in a drawer somewhere.
If you can cut or reduce the activation energy for the positive habits that you want to build, even by as little as 20 seconds at a time, then it won't be as hard for you to build life changing new habits into your life