Habit Formation

Have your partner write down their current habits and routines, and discuss where and when you want the new habit. If your partner has an existing routine, it may work best to anchor the new habit to a set of existing habits, an approach called habit stacking or piggybacking. If not, tie habits to a change of place. For example, your partner may do yoga when they get home from work.

The book Tiny Habits goes into detail on how to look for appropriate cues or prompts in the environment and how to fit new behavior into existing routines and is worth checking out.

At the beginning, keep the habit small. When starting the habit, it should take less than two minutes to do. For example, if your partner is going to do yoga, start by doing some very simple stretches on the yoga mat. After the habit is established, use habit shaping to grow the habit into something greater.

Rehearse the activity with your partner and design the environment for the habit. Make sure that they have all the tools they need to perform the habit, i.e. if you want them to do yoga, make sure they have a yoga mat in the room.

If your partner is motivated by rewards, you can set up a point system for executing the habit and have prizes that are handed out at various milestones. Don’t underestimate the motivational power of a cupcake with a sparkler in it.

For some habits, your partner may want you to be the accountability partner. This means that your partner will be asking you to act like a coach, keep track of their habit, and hold them accountable to their commitment.

Once you have the habit planned out, create a commitment statement that encapsulates when and where your partner will execute the habit. This statement is slightly different depending on whether it is tied to habit stacking or not.

For example, if your partner is going to start yoga, do it after they get out of the shower.

If it is not tied to an existing habit, it’s an implementation intention.

Activity based cues may be frequent or infrequent events. For example, your partner may have a statement that says "When I finish a book, I will write a review on StoryGraph" or "When I leave the bathroom, I will leave the toilet seat down."

If your partner is using implementation intentions tied to time, make it as general as possible, i.e. do yoga in the morning before work. The more specific, more brittle.

Once the habit is set up, your partner should commit to the habit. Technically, you can make commitment statements for later in the week, but I think they should be spoken and committed to on the day.

Commitment is a personal statement of intention. It needs to come from within, and your partner has to mean it. Commitment reinforces the post hypnotic suggestion and "primes" your partner for the habit.

Ideally, commitment should happen when your partner can focus and be mindful. Your partner may need a reminder to commit, such as a post-it note, and your partner may want to make reinforcement of the commitment part of an existing routine in habit stacking. The commitment reminder should remind them to commit to the habit. A commitment reminder can enhance compliance.

For example, your partner may put up a "When I get out of the shower, I will do yoga" post-it on the bathroom mirror, and repeat the commitment statement out loud while showering.

Your partner may want to use the notification feature on their phone as a commitment reminder. This is fine, with some important caveats.

If your partner relies on notification as the cue for the habit, it supports repetition but hinders habit development. In essence, the habit being developed is "do the action described in the notification" rather than internalizing the actions and building automaticity.

In addition, notifications are only useful if they work as cues. I have strong feelings about notifications, but they can be useful as long as you are mindful and responsible about them, and ensure that all notifications are meaningful. Ideally, notifications should be directly actionable with an immediate response. If a notification is not meaningful or actionable, especially if it does not come from a human, then it’s most likely useless. The appropriate immediate response to a useless notification is to disable notification for that app. Removing useless notifications ensures that meaningful notifications can work as cues.

Due is a reminder application that focuses on notifications. The advantage of Due is that it can hold the responsibility for all notifications; rather than having a dozen different applications notify you, you can set up Due notifications explicitly and see them all in a single widget. Due is not a replacement for calendar appointments and events that cannot be "caught up" if they are overdue, but it’s great for regular activities and maintainence tasks like getting haircuts and replacing the air filter.

Due can be especially useful for committing to implementation intentions that are tied to time. Your partner can set up Due to remind them of their commitment to the habit, ideally when your partner can give their attention and mind to commitment.

Due is particularly useful for its ability to "snooze" notifications, which lets your partner defer the time of commitment to a later time when they can focus completely. This is still an immediate response: "I will commit to this action at this time" which is acceptable. If your partner repeatedly snoozes a notification, it should be brought up in review as an issue.

For example, your partner could have a Due reminder that notifies them in the morning 3x a week with an commitment statement: "At 6 pm, I will exercise." That morning is a little hectic, so they defer the notification until mid-day when they can sit down, have coffee, and make the commitment then. At coffee, they then commit to the habit by closing their eyes and saying the commentment statement out loud to themselves three times. If the schedule needs to be modified, your partner can commit to exercise later or earlier in the day.

Once the habit has been executed, your partner will track it by marking it down in a habit tracker.

Using an analog journal, rocketbook, or calendar as a habit tracker can be effective, but using an online todo list is also fine.

Apple’s built in Reminders app works well for simple habit tracking. It works best with the title set to a short name and the commitment statement in the notes. Your partner can set repeat on a reminder, and the reminder will show up on future days even when the current reminder is completed. The nice thing about Reminders is that it also shows up in the Apple calendar application, although it is limited — you cannot filter for a particular list, for example. Reminders also has a shared list feature that your partner can use to share habit tracking with you, if you are acting as an accountability partner — this has the benefit of notifying you when they complete the habit.

Reminders does have due dates and due times which can be helpful to show on the Today view as "Morning" / "Afternoon" / "Tonight" but it comes with the side-effect of enabling a notification at the due date and time, which can interfere with habit development. I recommend disabling Reminders built-in notification entirely and relying exclusively on Due or a calendar application for greater control over notifications. If you use Due’s upgrade pass, it integrates with Reminders and can show you Reminder lists in the side menu so that you can easily set up notifications from an Apple reminder if necessary.

Reminders is a good ad-hoc system, but it is not explicitly a habit tracker. It does not present skipped or completed habits very well in review, although Calendar does let you see the whole week at once. It also does not provide a way to backfill habits from the previous day as being completed — if the habit was done but it wasn’t clicked on the day, you have to add the reminder in explicitly.

Unfortunately, most habit tracking applications are not great in general. There’s a number of habit formation features that are still not implemented by habit trackers, and they tend to create a dependency on the application rather than encouraging automaticity.

The best explicit habit tracking app for partners that I’ve found is Obedience, which has shared goals for partner based relationships and a built-in point based reward system, which can be very effective. However, it’s specifically focused on BDSM relationships and refers to "dominant" and "submissive" roles inside the application, which may not be your style.

You should have a regular check-in for reviewing habits, ideally on the weekends during a quiet period. If you already have a regular check-in for timeboxed post hypnotic suggestion, you can extend it to review suggestions as well.

Review is important to help your partner organize and process their feelings about the habit, and determine if they want to make changes and grow the habit. For example, after a week of stretching on the yoga mat, your partner may want to try 10 minutes of yoga using Down Dog.

If your partner is having unhelpful thoughts that interfere with the habit, change the suggestion to deal with those thoughts (although this is not a substitute for CBT).

If your partner suffers an injury or setback to their health but doesn’t want to risk losing habit formation, they can scale back to a level consistent with their current ability. For example if your partner is struggling with sleep issues, they should not be doing yoga poses that involve balance or coordination because they could lose balance and fall. If your partner is struggling and dislikes the new habit more and more (too loud, too far, too much), scale everything well back to the level that they were comfortable. If it’s not a good fit for them, explore more and try similar habits that play more to their strengths.

You may be acting as an accountability partner and reviewing your partner’s habit. If your partner has missed some days, this can be an uncomfortable conversation. The goal here is to be a supportive coach for your partner, not a judge or parent.

You can discuss any changes you need to make to habit formation suggestions. Your partner may want to make changes to the suggestions, or even want to remove post hypnotic suggestions from the habit altogether if they feel hypnosis is not a good fit for them.

Once you’re done with review and have a good understanding of the habit, it’s time to get to the good bit: hypnotizing your partner and giving them post hypnotic suggestions for the habit that will last until the next review.

You can work implementation intentions and habit stacking into your suggestions where appropriate, but you can be explicit about how you want them to experience the habit. Work suggestions around the four stages of a habit:

You should think carefully when crafting suggestions to make them fit this format. Describe the trigger, and then go into the craving that the response would satisfy, and the anticipation of the reward.

In the yoga example, the cue for the behavior is getting out of the shower. The craving is the feeling of being stiff and inflexible and the desire to stretch and bend. The response is the actual act of yoga. And the reward is the feeling of accomplishment and happy body feelings.

In addition, if you are tracking with a point system and they have a milestone to look forward to, you can have them focus on accumulating additional points and have them look forward to how good that cupcake will taste.

Depending on your system, you may want to keep a logbook of your review work and any changes made to your suggestions. This can help keep track of the adjustments over time and be useful when doing later habit formation work.

At some point, the habit grows to a point where it’s more than a simple series of steps, it becomes a routine that needs its own environment. To prepare the environment, you and your partner will need to do prep work.

A boringly large part of habit formation is preparation, and preperation is in itself a routine: large parts of your daily routine will inevitably be setup for other routines that you plan to do later in the day or week. This is not a guide to adulting, but if you aren’t familiar with prep work in your daily life, start there first. Get an organization system that works for you, then find something that would be easier to do with some preparation, and turn that into a habit of preparation that you can then grow out into a routine.

There are three main things that are force multipliers in prep work:

It can take months for a habit to grow into a routine and become automatic. You may want to keep reminders and checklists around, but keep them archived in a folder so they are available for reference.

Once your partner has grown the routine out to the point where the basics are taken care of and you are optimizing the processes around the routine, your partner should join a community organized around the routine and introduce themself. This helps your partner identify more with the new activity.

Involvement with a community not only helps identify with the activity, but can also provide its own rewards in social recognition and acknowledgement.

The first way to break the habit is to reduce or eliminate the cue which prompts the habit.

For example, if your partner wants to avoid a social media site, they can suppress notifications and emails, or delete their account.

Breaking the craving involves making it unattractive. This doesn’t mean associating a bad habit with them with negative feelings, but satisfying the craving with a substitute habit that is not compatible with the bad habit. Most bad habits are associated with stress or boredom.

Talk to your partner about picking new habits that can solve for stress or boredom that have more positive outcomes. For example, instead of stress eating, your partner can get a fidget spinner. Instead of checking TikTok on their phone, they can carry a Kindle around.

Also, have your partner talk about all the parts of the habit that they hate, and record it on video. When they get the craving, they can watch the video to reduce their motivation as they remember all the negative aspects of the bad habit.

Part of what makes a bad habit easy is that the environment is set up such that executing the habit is easy. Increase friction. If the cue is checking the phone, your partner can leave the phone in an inconvenient place. If there are computer games, they can keep them on a removable hard drive. This is called precommitment.

Your partner can also use a commitment device. If there’s a website or social media that your partner checks, your partner can install software that can block or limit interaction with the site. If your ISP offers parental management, your partner can put their devices on a limited profile.

Finally, simply being there and acting as an accountability partner is very helpful for your partner. Explaining the bad habit on review is bad enough, but when there’s a contract involved, there may be a cost involved.

Obedience has a punishment feature that has the option of removing points earned, so that points earned by good activities are removed by bad activities. I don’t recommend this for habit formation, as it implies that habits are fungible.

Also, while I’m on the fence about missing good habits leading to punishment, I don’t think bad habits should lead to punishment, especially if applied by another person outside of a kink context. I think that punishment changes the punisher as much as it changes the punished, and it tends not to produce solutions.

I especially do not like the idea of spending money on an anti-charity or sending gifts or donations to causes your partner is against as part of a habit contract. If it’s really not working, put money into a fund to see a certified professional and spend the money there.

Review and hypnosis works the same way as described in habit formation: see what’s working, what’s not working, and listen.

When creating suggestions, incorporate all the elements of the habit: avoiding the cue, finding another habit more appealing, how tiresome it would be to work against the friction, how it would feel being held accountable for it.