How to Build a New Habit

It’s easier than you think to start a breathwork practice

After last week’s post about screen apnea, someone commented that she’s definitely a breath-holder and she was looking forward to trying the technique.

My first instinct was to reply with a tip: if you’re about to look at a screen, pay attention to your breathing. But that’s not really the missing piece, and I didn’t want to hand her a nice-sounding but forgettable sentence that completely fails to take hold.

So here’s the real answer.

Hoping and Planning are Not the Same Thing

“I’ll breathe more” is a hope. It feels like a plan because it has intention behind it, but intention was never the part that was missing. The reader who left that comment already has it.

What she probably doesn’t have yet is something psychologists call an implementation intention – a specific if-then statement that names the exact moment a behavior happens.

Peter Gollwitzer, the NYU psychologist who coined the term, has spent over thirty years studying the gap between deciding to do something and actually doing it. In a meta-analysis covering nearly a hundred studies, people who made a specific if-then plan (”if I open my email, then I’ll take one full breath”) were dramatically more likely to follow through than people who just resolved to do the thing in general. The plan doesn’t need to be clever. It just needs a framework.

Are You Choosing the Wrong Kind of Cue?

Here’s the part that surprises people: the specific cue you choose matters more than how motivated you are.

USC psychologist Wendy Wood has studied habit formation for decades. She’s found that habits take root through repeated pairing with a stable context – the same place, the same trigger, the same moment, over and over, until your brain stops treating it as a decision at all.

(This is also why habits are so resistant to willpower-based fixes. They were never running on willpower. They were running on context.)

The moment you pick matters. A vague intention like “when I’m stressed” doesn’t work well as a cue, because “stressed” isn’t consistent or specific enough to register as a trigger. You’ve got to run through an analysis (“am I stressed?”) to decide whether or not the moment “counts” enough to warrant the behavior. Warning: rumination and overanalysis ahead!

Choosing a concrete and repetitive action as a trigger for breathing (opening your laptop, braking to slow down for a red light, hanging up the phone) works better because it’s an objective event. It’s much easier to remember to breathe when the thing happens because there’s no question whether it’s happening.

The Truth Behind the 21-Day Myth

You’ve probably heard that it takes 21 days to build a habit. That number traces back to a 1960s plastic surgeon’s casual observation about patients adjusting to their appearance, not behavioral science.

A study led by Phillippa Lally at University College London tracked people building a new daily habit and found it took an average of 66 days for the behavior to become automatic. Some people get there sooner; others take months longer.

Notably, Lally’s research showed that missing one day here or there had almost no effect on the eventual outcome, as long as the behavior kept showing up at the same cue. Overall consistency beats absolute perfection.

A Simple Way to Start

Productivity experts like BJ Fogg (creator of Tiny Habits) and James Clear (Fogg’s protege and the author of Atomic Habits) are proponents of making the behavior so small at first that skipping it would almost require effort.

So here’s the actual practice, for the reader who left that comment and for anyone in the same spot.

Pick a moment that already happens at least once a day, every day, without exception. Opening your email is a good one. So is when your feet hit the ground getting out of bed, or when you get into the car, or when you pick up your phone.

Any time your chosen event occurs, take one full breath, inhaling and exhaling completely through your nose.

To make sure you do this every time it happens, you may want to use external tools like sticky notes, other visual reminders, and calendar alarms to help you remind yourself. Think about the last time you picked up a new habit. What helped you remember to do it, and how can that apply here?

Set up your reinforcements knowing that even with them in place, you’ll still sometimes forget to breathe on cue. That’s fine. The cue will come back around tomorrow, if not later today yet.

Once you’ve gotten used to responding to it, then you can decide to breathe longer. You can also bring in specific techniques. But for now, you’re just getting into the habit of cue → breath, cue → breath.

Not building a breathing practice yet, but laying the wiring that makes a breathing practice part of your day, and your life.

Last Gasp

“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”

— William James

Want some specific breathing techniques for once the habit takes? Download your free “5 Breaths to Change How You Feel in 5 Minutes” kit and I’ll send you my weekly newsletter, too. Sign up here.