Therapists share 5 tips for using habit trackers to keep to your goals

• Keeping up with healthy habits, or unlearning harmful habits, can take time and effort.
• Habit trackers can help physically map out your goals and hold you accountable.
• Below, we've outlined therapists' tips for how to most effectively use habit trackers.

Most people know you're supposed to get eight hours of sleep a night, but it can be hard to stick to that guideline. After all, how are you supposed to motivate yourself to go to bed early when the latest popular series is just sitting on Netflix, waiting to be binged?

One way to encourage healthy habits: Use a habit tracker. Habit tracking involves keeping a log of your behaviors, either healthy or unhealthy.

Habit trackers can hold you accountable to meeting your goals, provide reinforcement to keep you motivated, and help you find obstacles to your success. They can help you maintain healthy habits — like brushing your teeth every day, or overcome harmful habits — like overuse of alcohol.

There are lots of different habit trackers on the market, from apps to journals to good old-fashioned calendars.

Different trackers are best for different people, according to Yasmine Saad, a clinical psychologist and founder and CEO of Madison Park Psychological Services. "It's very much about what do you respond best to," she says. 

If you're interested in getting into habit tracking, here are a few tips from psychology experts about how to track your habits and some tools to try.

1. Use a pen-and-paper journal

Physical habit trackers can come in the form of a list, a calendar, a bullet journal, or another type of notebook.

Pen and paper habit trackers have a lot of benefits, Saad says, including:

• They're more engaging than app-based products: Physically writing things down engages your whole body and helps you remember them better than just typing them up.
• They're creative and flexible: Instead of being stuck with someone else's outline, you can decide the best way to track your habits. You can even get artistic if you want to.
• They encourage unplugging and self-reflection: Getting away from screens gives you a better opportunity to create a ritual around your habit tracking.

The key is to find a tracker that fits your personality, Saad says. If you aren't a huge fan of screen time and being online, a pen and paper tracker might be a great choice. But if you've always got your phone in hand, an app-based tracker might be a better fit.

2. Try an app-based tracker

Apps can be helpful for people who want a structured, ready-to-go tracker, Saad says. Many of them are free for download and relatively simple to use.

A few popular habit tracking apps include:

Habitica

Habitica offers a creative approach to tracking habits, allowing users to customize their goals, Saad says. It's also heavy on positive reinforcement, and can be a good choice for young people or creatives.

HabitBull

If you love data, you might also love HabitBull, which allows users to input detailed information they can analyze in the form of graphs and tables like an Excel sheet, Saad says. 

It also allows you to set weekly or monthly goals instead of just daily targets, which gives some wiggle room for when obstacles come up, says Josh King, a clinical psychologist at the Center for Motivation and Change and the host of their podcast, the Beyond Addiction Show.

Done

Unlike HabitBull, Done has a basic list format that allows users to say whether they did or did not complete a habit on a certain day. It might be a good choice for people who like the positive reinforcement of crossing tasks off a checklist, Saad says.

Strides

Strides, like many habit tracking apps, motivates you by showing your streaks of good behavior, King says. You don't want to break the streak, so you keep up the good habit. It also allows you to set a goal completion time for a behavior within a range of dates, which helps promote self-compassion if you don't meet your initial goal.

When apps aren't the best option

Most apps work for all sorts of goals. Still, there are some exceptions. 

For example, if you want to reduce the amount of alcohol you drink each week from twenty to ten servings, a yes-no tracker, like Done, would probably be a bad fit for you because there wouldn't be a simple way to input that information, says Paul Greene, a clinical psychologist and the director of the Manhattan Center for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. 

On the other hand, a yes-no tracker could work great for a habit like flossing, where you simply want to mark whether or not you completed a certain activity in a given day.

3. Be deliberate in how you set your goals

Habit tracking is a great tool, but it's only as good as your goals are. If you only have a vague idea of how you want to change, you're going to struggle to move forward, King says.

Instead, he recommends creating goals that are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. 

For instance, a lot of people might set a goal for themselves to "eat healthier." But that doesn't actually tell you how you should be changing your behavior – and it's hard to track and evaluate progress towards that goal over time, King says.

A better goal might be aiming to eat five servings of fruit or vegetables every day for a month. This goal is specific as well as measurable, so it's easy to follow with a habit tracker.

Make sure, too, that your goals line up with your values and interests, King says. "If I actually hate going to the gym, I just don't want to do it and I don't have any reason to do it except there's pressure from the world that you're supposed to go to the gym — I'm not going to do it and tracking isn't going to make it more likely that I'm going to do it," he says.

4. Ask yourself what purpose a bad habit is serving

All bad habits serve a purpose, Saad says. If you try to stop a bad behavior before you figure out how it serves you, you'll struggle.

For instance, you might usually sleep until noon on Saturdays and want to start getting up earlier. Waking up earlier is a fine goal – but before you can achieve it, you have to recognize how sleeping in might be helping you, such as by allowing you to rest and recharge from a stressful work week, Saad says.

"If you don't consider this and how you're gonna approach the new habit with the zest you will need, it's going to be very hard to implement a new behavior because you remove the negative behavior but also the positive, the benefit of the behavior," Saad says.

Instead, try to find a way to replace a bad behavior's value in your life. In the case of sleeping in, for example, you could start a habit of journaling on Saturdays to help you decompress.

5. Track over a long period of time

In the era of instant gratification, everyone wants results overnight, but that's not how habit tracking works. 

You should track your habits for at least two weeks to get a feel for the intervention and your own behaviors, Greene says. "It's not the kind of thing people should be expecting to change their life in a day or two."

It's especially important to give yourself time to track more infrequent behaviors. For instance, if you want to cut back on your drinking but you usually only binge once or twice a week, try tracking your consumption for a few months before you make a decision whether habit tracking is helpful to you, Greene says.

Tracking over a longer period also gives you a better idea of whether or not you've been able to change your habits. "There's just a bigger sample size that you can draw conclusions from," Greene says.

Insider's takeaway

Habit tracking is a great, evidence-backed way to help yourself improve your behavior. Whether you want to start drinking more water, go to sleep earlier, or be more mindful, using habit tracking apps and being deliberate about your goal setting can help drive you towards success.

Still, remember, habit tracking is not a magic bullet: it's a tool. "Habit tracking is best utilized for problems where you're firmly convinced that this is a good idea for you," Greene says.

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