There’s a pattern I see with English learners here in Fujieda: someone downloads an app over the holidays, studies every day for a week or two, and by mid-January it’s sitting unopened on their phone, right next to last year’s apps. The motivation was real when they started—that’s never the problem. The problem is that motivation is the wrong fuel for a daily habit. It burns hot and fades fast.

BJ Fogg, a behavior scientist at Stanford, has spent decades studying why people fail to change habits—and his answer has almost nothing to do with willpower. His method, called Tiny Habits, works differently: start so small that failure is nearly impossible, attach the behavior to something you already do every day, and let it grow on its own.

In this guide: How to turn English study into an automatic daily routine using BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits framework—no motivation required. Read time: ~7 minutes.

Table of Contents

Why Most Study Habits Fail

Fogg’s research comes down to one observation: a behavior happens only when three things come together at the same moment—Motivation (M), Ability (A), and a Prompt (P). He calls it B = MAP. When one is high, the other can be low—which is why making a behavior absurdly easy means you can do it even when motivation is at zero.

Most people try to build habits by cranking up motivation. New Year’s resolutions, expensive courses, public commitments. It works—for a while. But motivation fluctuates wildly. It’s high when something is new, gone on a rainy Tuesday after a long day. When motivation dips and the behavior is still hard, nothing happens, and no amount of reminding yourself changes that. If you’ve read my post on why motivation fails and systems don’t, this is the science behind that idea.

Fogg’s insight is that instead of fighting motivation, you work on the other side: make the behavior so easy that you barely need motivation at all. Something that takes ten seconds and zero willpower can survive even your worst day. The third piece—the prompt—is what makes the whole thing automatic. Not a phone notification you swipe away, but a moment in your existing routine that reliably triggers the new action. “After I pour my coffee” is a prompt. “Sometime in the morning” is not.

The Three Principles

Make it tiny. Scale the behavior down until it feels almost ridiculous. Not “study English for 30 minutes” but “open my flashcards and review one card.” Not “practice speaking” but “say one English sentence out loud.” The point isn’t to stay this small forever—it’s to make starting so frictionless that you never skip it. Fogg’s own version: after his feet hit the floor each morning, he says it’s going to be a great day. That’s the entire habit. Two seconds.

Anchor it to something real. Every tiny habit follows the same recipe: “After I [existing routine], I will [tiny behavior].” The anchor needs to be specific and reliable—something you do every day without thinking about it. “After I sit down on the train” works. “When I have free time” doesn’t, because free time is a feeling, not a moment. The anchor removes the decision of when to study, and that decision is often the real barrier.

Celebrate immediately. This is the part most people skip, and Fogg considers it the most important. Right after you do the tiny behavior—not after a week of consistency, not when you see results—you create a small moment of positive emotion. A quiet fist pump, a smile, a mental “nice.” It sounds silly. But this is how your brain forms habits. The positive feeling tells your nervous system this is worth repeating. Without it, the behavior stays fragile. With it, the habit builds more reliably than you’d expect.

Tiny Habit Recipes for English Learners

Here are recipes built around daily routines common in Fujieda:

  • After I pour my morning coffee, I will review one flashcard from my Leitner box.
  • After I sit down on the train, I will read one English sentence on my phone.
  • After I finish dinner, I will say one English sentence about my day out loud.
  • After I open my laptop at work, I will write one English sentence in a notebook.
  • After I brush my teeth at night, I will listen to ten seconds of an English podcast.

Each of these takes under thirty seconds. That’s the point. You’re not building a study session—you’re building a connection in your brain that links a daily moment to English. Once that connection is strong, you’ll naturally start doing more. One flashcard becomes five. One sentence becomes a paragraph. But the growth has to come from the habit pulling you forward, not from willpower pushing you.

The tiny habit doesn’t teach you English by itself—it builds the consistency that makes real learning possible.

Start One This Week

  1. Pick one English behavior you want—vocabulary review, speaking practice, listening, anything.
  2. Scale it down to something you can do in under ten seconds.
  3. Find your anchor: a specific moment in your daily routine that happens every day.
  4. Write the recipe: “After I [anchor], I will [tiny behavior].”
  5. Do it—and celebrate immediately. Smile. Say “yes.” Mean it.

Don’t start five habits at once. Pick one. Do it for a week. When it feels automatic—when you do it without deciding to—that’s when the connection is strong enough to build on.

If you’d like help figuring out which tiny habit fits your English goals, I’d be happy to work through it with you in a lesson.

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