What Duolingo Taught Me About Building Habits
Some time ago, I reached a 60-day streak on Duolingo. (A language-learning app).
The first thing I thought was that I was proud that I had stuck to something for more than a week.
The second thing I thought was that it would have been nice if I could have worked out for 60 days too. (Maybe I’d have abs by now.) But getting myself to work out was a lot harder than pulling out my phone and translating a couple of sentences. It was strange that I could easily build a habit out of one thing but not another.
Over the next 30 days I tried to build new habits while continuing with Duolingo. I was able to identify what increased my chances of growing a habit vs what led to me eventually quitting. I also found a couple of key indicators that influenced what habits I grew vs didn’t.
Surprisingly enough, Duolingo taught me quite a bit about building habits and keeping them.
Here’s what I learned:
Painful Habits are Harder to Build
While I was imagining the abs I could have had if I’d worked out for 70 days, I thought back to the other habits I had tried to build before: working out, writing for 10 minutes every day, drinking water every morning, meditating daily, and eating healthy. I noticed a simple pattern:
Working out is painful, doing my daily Duolingo lessons is not.
Writing for 10 minutes is painful, drinking water is not.
Eating healthy food is painful, meditating is not.
If you haven’t guessed it yet, I’ve been able to successfully build all the habits that don’t cause me pain.
Now, I don’t mean that these habits are physically painful (except working out.) I just mean that they provide some sort of discomfort (perceived or not) in the process of doing them.
For example, eating healthy food doesn’t actually give me pain. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. But the idea that I might have to give up a bag of chips for brussel sprouts is uncomfortable, making it hard to grow a habit out of it.
If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to start a habit, it may be because you’re trying to avoid the discomfort or the idea of discomfort that comes with it. As a human being, this is natural. In fact, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud suggested that people make the majority of their choices to reduce or avoid pain at all costs.
When I realized this, I tried to identify the displeasure associated with the habits I wanted to build, starting with writing for 10 minutes every day. For me, getting up to write felt difficult because I was afraid of not being able to write something that was considered “good” or “high standards.” I had to remind myself that what I write is for me, and that it doesn’t have to be great, especially the first time.
Discomforts can be as detailed as that, or as simple as “I don’t want to give up eating cookies because I like them.” In these cases, I worked on starting smaller. Ex: go from eating 4 cookies a day to 1.
Another thing that worked was balancing out the pain and pleasure. Ex: For every snack I eat, I’ll eat one cup of broccoli.
While you can try and reduce the discomfort associated with a habit, you can also try and increase the pleasure by changing how you think about the habit. When it came to getting into the habit of working out, I started by envisioning the end result. I knew that I wanted more endurance, so I imagined being able to run 10 miles straight without stopping. (This was a bit of an exaggerated thought, but you get the point.)
Thinking about this made me more inclined to get up and go out for a run every morning, and I began to enjoy doing it, making it easier to continue.
If I Can Come Up With an Excuse, I Won’t Do It
Duolingo is great because the notification pops up on my phone and my laptop at the same time. It’s easy to just click and do a quick 5-minute lesson every day. (Plus the bird is just scary enough to make me not want to miss a lesson.) The reminders and knowledge that it won’t take me too long to complete the habit make it easier to sustain.
For other habits, however, I was able to come up with excuses that felt like justified reasons to not engage in them. Statements like “I’m too tired” or “I don’t have enough time” or “It’s too far away” often popped up in my head. The moment I let myself think this way was the moment I would decide to shrug and give up for the day.
To address this I came up with ways to eliminate excuses as much as possible. The first thing I did was make it ridiculously easy to complete the habit. When I started trying to develop my morning routine, I set myself up for success. I wanted to drink water, tidy my bed, and work out every morning. I knew for a fact that if I woke up and the water was downstairs, I wouldn’t drink it. So I made sure to put a water bottle next to my bed, making it nearly impossible to miss.
For tidying my bed, I laid my bed the night before, and since I’m not someone who moves around too much in my sleep, I woke up with little to do.
Another thing that helped me a lot was setting reminders at the same time every day for all my habits, this way “forgetting” wouldn’t be an excuse. Having a pop-up notification on my phone that I could check off helped me make sure I went about my day doing everything I needed.
A recent study showed that creating time-based triggers helps build repetition, and another indicated that setting your own reminders rather than relying on a habit app builds a sense of self-empowerment. These reminders made me more inclined to adhere to the habits, while also reducing the number of excuses I could make.
Rewards and Milestones are Key to Staying Consistent
Trying to change infrequent behaviors into habits can be difficult when you’re not used to them, and missing days can be really demotivating. I found that while trying to train habits, once I missed one day, I missed several in a row.
After that, it was easy to just give up and forget about them. What I found that helped me get back into the habits was giving myself small rewards every time I did the habits.
And it can be anything really small.
On Duolingo, you can see your streak fire emoji turn orange once you’ve done your lesson for the day. The more lessons you do, the more XP you gain, and the higher your rank. These small rewards were enough to motivate me to keep doing the lessons every day.
I applied a similar concept to exercising. For every day I exercised, I would be able to watch an extra 20 minutes of a show I enjoyed while completing the workout. (Which, if I may add, made things way less painful for me.) This made me look forward to exercising because I knew that otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to watch the show as much later in the day.
Milestones were also helpful for keeping me motivated. I really enjoyed reaching streaks like a 7-day streak, and a 14-day streak on Duolingo, so I did the same thing with my other habits. I’d keep checking them off and celebrate when I reached a benchmark. This kept me from getting bored or unmotivated with my habits along the way.
Keep Yourself Accountable
There are many ways to do this, like making organized visuals that help you track your consistency. I use Notion to fill my habits in a table and share this page with my friends. They’re able to comment on them and see how often I do my habits. (My friends just love to point out when I miss a day, so that’s fun.)
My favorite way is to make a challenge among my friends to encourage all of us to engage in fun habits.
With some of my friends at TKS, I created a morning habits challenge that kept everyone accountable for waking up at 6 am, laying their beds, drinking water, and doing a 30-second plank. The challenge was set up so that we got points for each habit we did, with the winner getting a prize at the end. This made the habits easy to remember and fun to do.
I’m still continuing to learn more about habits and how I can engage in more positive ones as I grow older.
Key Takeaways 🔑
- People do what they can to avoid pain and gain pleasure. Reframe your habits so that they bring less discomfort
- Make the habit as easy as possible until you run out of excuses for why you can’t do it
- Keep yourself accountable by engaging in these habits with friends
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Hi, I’m Adeola! I’m a 16-year-old innovator who loves tech and the environment. Want to talk?
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