Keeping a good habit isn’t easy, but one mental hack that can help with staying consistent is preaching about it, says behavioral design expert Nir Eyal.
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Making resolutions is easier than following through on them. How many times have we sat down at the end of the year, determined that we’d eat healthier or wake up earlier to go to the gym three times a week? Just to break those promises before January is over.
However, being able to develop and maintain a good habit is crucial to living a healthy life.
According to the World Health Organization, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), including heart disease, stroke and diabetes, are collectively responsible for 74% of all deaths globally. While these diseases tend to be the result of a combination of genetic, physiological and environmental factors, behavioral factors also come into play.
Some of the biggest behavioral — and preventable — risk factors include: insufficient physical activity, unhealthy diets, harmful use of alcohol and tobacco use, according to a December report by the WHO.
But, there is one brain hack that could help keep a healthy habit: preaching. That’s according to Nir Eyal, behavioral design expert and best-selling author of “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.”
Re-engineering tool
The idea is to use preaching as a tool to re-engineer or strengthen your identity. Doing so can help you become more consistent with a good habit, Eyal said.
“Ever heard the joke: How do you know someone’s a vegetarian? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you,” wrote Eyal in a recent LinkedIn post.
“This isn’t just a joke — it reveals something powerful about behavior. The people who stick to a philosophy— whether it’s vegetarianism, keto, or intermittent fasting — are the ones who talk about it,” he said.
When you tell other people: ‘keto is the way,’ or ‘I read this book and now I’m a follower of this methodology,’ or whatever the case might be — by preaching about it, you’re more likely to abide by it.
Nir Eyal
Author, “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life”
This is because preaching can help reinforce identity, Eyal said. The same way a vegetarian probably wouldn’t wonder whether or not to eat a steak for dinner, or someone who is kosher wouldn’t wake up wondering if they should eat bacon for breakfast.
“When you tell other people: ‘keto is the way,’ or ‘I read this book and now I’m a follower of this methodology,’ or whatever the case might be — by preaching about it, you’re more likely to abide by it,” Eyal told CNBC Make It. “What would otherwise just be an opinion, becomes an identity, and that’s when it’s very, very hard to shape.”
Along with identity reinforcement, consistency bias is another reason why preaching could help with being consistent with a good habit, according to Eyal.
“If you look at the work from the 1980s by Robert Cialdini, it’s a well-known principle that we seek to be consistent with our past behavior, and in psychology, we call this a consistency bias,” Eyal said.
“We don’t want to be inconsistent because it makes us look like liars,” he said. “So, if you say one thing, you seek to be consistent with what you said. Ironically, even if, deep down, you want to change your mind, it’s difficult to do, because you were already committed to it.”
Social pressure also plays a role. “When we declare something publicly, we are held accountable to it based on our social bonds,” Eyal said. There’s a fear that if we abandon our habits or publicly-stated beliefs, it can reflect poorly on us or ostracize us from our community, he explained.
“We’re a very social species, so anything that threatens our group identity is very terrifying, so we’re more likely to stay consistent,” Eyal said.
But an important caveat is that we shouldn’t be a “jerk” about it, he noted.
“This is also a great way to lose friends. If people think you’re putting yourself in one group and putting them in a different group — that can be harmful. So you want to make sure that [while] something is good for you, [it’s] not alienating to others.”
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