Once Juni understood a key maxim of Behavior Design—simplicity changes behavior—she refocused her personal efforts to create a constellation of habits, tiny in size but big on impact, that helped her to kick her sugar habit for good.

A much better approach is to design the garden (habits) you want. You identify what vegetables and flowers you’d love to have in your garden (motivation), you choose plants you can easily support (ability), and you consider which spot in the yard is best for each plant (finding a place in your routine).

It takes a bit of planning and care in the beginning to get those delicate little sprouts up and out of the ground, but you’ve made sure the roots are strong by celebrating your tiny successes. Soon it’s time to let your rooted habits do their natural thing—grow bigger.

Here are guidelines for knowing how to adjust the difficulty of your habit:

• Don’t pressure yourself to do more than the tiniest version of your habit. If you’re sick, tired, or just not in the mood, scale back to tiny. You can always raise the bar when you want to do more, and— surprisingly—you can lower it to tiny when you need to. Flexibility is part of this skill. 

• Don’t restrict yourself from going bigger if you want to do more. Let your motivation guide you on how much and how hard. 

• If you do too much, make sure you celebrate extra hard. Pushing yourself too much to expand a habit can create pain or frustration, which will weaken the habit. If that happens (and it will), you can offset the negative feelings by amping up your celebration. 

• Use emotional flags to help you find your edge. Frustration, pain, and especially avoidance are signs that something is going on with your habit—that you’ve probably increased the difficulty too much, too fast. On the flipside, if you become bored with your habit, you might need to ramp things up.

By layering your habit with environment redesign, you will reduce friction and set your habit free to go above the Action Line. All hail the mighty prewashed, presliced cucumber.

Habit 5 is powerful because it is right in the middle of your Circle of Influence. Many factors in interdependent situations are in your Circle of Concern—problems, disagreements, circumstances, other people’s behavior. And if you focus your energies out there, you deplete them with little positive results. But you can always seek first to understand. That’s something that’s within your control.