A Stanford Expert Would Like You to Stop Blaming Your Willpower and Floss One Tooth

If your New Year’s resolution is already gathering dust, a Stanford behavior change expert has a suggestion. Stop blaming your willpower, and start by flossing one tooth.

The advice comes from BJ Fogg, PhD, founder of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab and author of the bestselling book Tiny Habits. He laid out his approach in a January 2025 how-to piece by Sharon Brock on the Stanford Lifestyle Medicine site.¹

The piece cites a sobering number. Citing a Baylor College of Medicine page, it says studies show 88 percent of New Year’s resolutions are broken within the first two weeks of January, and 95 percent are abandoned by the end of the month.¹

“Research shows that relying on willpower is not how behavior change works,” Fogg said in the Stanford article.¹

What follows is practical guidance drawn from Fogg’s own Tiny Habits method, not the results of a new study. The article presents five separate strategies rather than steps to follow in order, so you can borrow whichever ones fit your life.

1. Pick a habit you already enjoy

“If you don’t like running, don’t have ‘go for a run every morning’ as your new year’s resolution. There are a hundred other ways to be active, so pick something you already enjoy,” Fogg said in the article.¹

The same goes for timing. If you’re not a morning person, the article suggests exercising at the end of the workday instead of setting a 5 a.m. alarm.¹

2. Make it almost embarrassingly small

The article’s examples include walking to the end of the driveway and back in your running shoes, tidying one piece of furniture each night, and flossing just one tooth. A smaller habit takes less motivation, and doing it consistently is what makes it automatic.¹

“The key is making the habit so small that you can do it even when you’re sick, busy, preoccupied, or just low motivation,” Fogg said.¹

The point isn’t the single tooth. In a talk, Fogg explained that people already know how to floss all their teeth. What they lack is automaticity, the ability to do it without thinking, and the tiny version trains exactly that.² Nobody needs a tutorial on tooth number two.

3. Let good feelings do the work

Fogg says positive emotion is what creates a habit, so people should feel proud of even tiny successes. Feeling successful, he says, can help a habit form faster.¹

“Most people are so hard on themselves, and they use guilt and shame to establish new habits, but that doesn’t work,” he said in the article.¹ Summaries of his Tiny Habits method describe this as a celebration right after you do the new behavior.³⁴

And if you were counting on the popular idea that a habit takes 28 days, the article says that one has been debunked, pointing to a paper in the European Journal of Social Psychology.¹

4. Attach the new habit to an old one

Fogg calls this “anchoring,” and it is also known as habit stacking. You link the new behavior to something you already do every day. The article’s examples: “After I make my coffee, I meditate,” and “After I turn on the faucet for my nightly bath, I floss my teeth.”¹

In the full Tiny Habits recipe, the anchor is just one part. An explainer describes it as an anchor, then a tiny behavior that takes under about 30 seconds, then an immediate celebration.³ Fogg’s standard example: “After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth.”²⁴

5. Change with other people

“We can change alone, with a friend or partner, or even with a group,” Fogg said.¹ He says accountability buddies work, and that changing together matters most for sleep, nutrition and media use.¹

His suggestion is a household meeting to agree on one behavior change for the year.¹

None of this asks for a dramatic overhaul. One tooth tonight is a perfectly respectable place to start.