If You Are Lazy, You Can Build or Break Any Habit With the 20-Second Rule
By: Prakash Joshi Pax
Tags: Life Lessons, Habits, Personal Development, Self Improvement, Self-awareness

How many times have you tried to make or break any habit and failed miserably? I’ve done it many times and yes, failed too. But one day, when I was on YouTube, I found this magical thing called the 20-second rule.

Since then, it has been pretty simple to break and make habits knowing how the brain works. From being a heavy social media user where my screen time was almost 10 hours daily, I’ve managed to reduce it to less than 2 hours. From procrastinating to working out regularly, I have managed to make pretty good improvements in my life using the 20-second rule.

So, you might be wondering what the 20-second rule is.

What is the 20-second rule?

The 20-second rule was given by New York Times Best-Selling Author Sawn Achor in his book The Happiness Advantage. Like many of us, he too struggled to make changes in his habits.

The principle of the 20-second rule is pretty simple. If you want to make a habit, you have to make it easier to integrate into your life by decreasing the activation energy.

Activation energy is the effort required to start a certain action. To be precise, the less time and effort required to start a certain action, the easier it will be to build a habit.

Similarly, the same thing is to be done when you want to break a habit. If you want to break a habit, you should make it hard to integrate into your life.

“By adding 20 seconds to my day, I gained back three hours.” — Shawn Achor

Why the 20-second rule works

We, human beings are lazy by birth. Our brains have evolved in such a way that, they tend to spend as little energy as possible to perform a certain action. This natural laziness can be used to build or break any habit using the 20 seconds rule.

Shawn Achor in his book, the happiness advantage, discussed his own struggle with behavioral change. He wanted to practice playing guitar more often while reducing the amount of time he spent watching TV.

However, like all of us, he encountered a problem when he wanted to change his behavioral pattern. Telling himself he will do it wasn’t enough for him to actually do it. His guitar still stayed in the closet and watching TV remained his default action.

He recognized that he needed to disrupt his default behavioral patterns otherwise nothing would change.

He soon realized that whenever he wanted to play guitar, he had to first go to the closet, take the guitar out and only once he got the guitar out he could actually play.

This process took roughly 20 seconds, but even this minimal effort required seems to be enough to stop Shawn from playing guitar. After he became aware of this, he took out the guitar and put it in a guitar stand in the living room instead.

Now, whenever he wanted to play, he didn’t have to search from the closet any longer. He was able to pick it up with very little activation energy and play it.

He also applied the same approach to his TV habit. He took the batteries out of the remote control and moved them to a drawer in another room. The next few nights, when he got home from the work and sat on the couch, he noticed that something was wrong.

He kept on pressing the ON button on the remote forgetting he removed the batteries. He didn’t feel like getting up and going to another room to get the batteries, as this would take extra effort.

Instead, he picked up and played his guitar which was within his arm’s reach. As days passed, his urge to watch TV decreased, and playing guitar started to feel more natural. This simple and slightest intervention allowed him to change his default behavior.

“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,” Shawn writes in his book. “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 strategy might sound simple but most of us don’t utilize it. The most difficult part of any behavior is starting out. The more activation energy you need to start an activity, the less likely you are to start. And the less activation energy it requires the more likely you are to do it.

How I use the 20-second rule

In this story, I will be talking about how I used it to make and break multiple habits.