The Best Mental Models For Understanding Human Behavior

Classical conditioning uses associations to break bad and build positive habits. You can pair a healthy activity—exercise or meditation—with a reward you enjoy—a favorite playlist or podcast. This reinforces the habit. It makes it easier to maintain over time. As the behavioral loop strengthens, desired actions will start to feel pleasurable. That’s when you know you have developed a good, robust habit. Use incentives to push yourself. Link actions to rewards and/or consequences. Align those habits with something intrinsic, like improved well-being or personal growth. Not just extrinsic rewards, such as money, a slice of cake, or social recognition.

Anchoring helps set a reference point for behavioral change. If your aim is to exercise for an hour daily, start with half-hour sessions to anchor in your efforts. Gradually scale up. Build momentum: tap into inertia. Inertia is the tendency to resist to change to habitual patterns. Hence small, consistent, incremental steps work to overcome inertia and drill in a habit without feeling overwhelmed. Replace just one unhealthy meal per week. Exercise just once. Meditate for less time than you think you can. Once you have built a relatively stable, sustainable habit, you can apply progression.

The 80/20 rule or Pareto principle reminds you to identify and prioritize the 20 percent of actions that determine 80 percent of results. When changing behavior, hone in on the essentials that have the greatest impact on your desired outcome. Such as sleep for health and performance. You have to choose because everything is a trade-off. Prioritizing morning workouts may mean sacrificing an hour of sleep. Whether the opportunity cost is worth it depends on your objectives. Generally, so long as the long-term health and wealth benefits outweigh the short-term comfort, the decision is just.

How you see it matters. Loss aversion highlights the human tendency to avoid losses more than seeking gains. Leverage this bias for commitment, like financial stakes. Bet on your progress. If you don’t follow through, donate to a charity or give the money to your kids to waste. Similarly, reframe your goals in a more appealing light. In lieu of seeing exercise as a “calorie burning” activity, view it as “building strength” or “boosting energy”. This makes it appear like less of a chore. Throw in Hanlon’s razor here as well: there is no need to overcomplicate your failures. More often than not, setbacks are due to simple oversights and lack of preparation than deeper flaws. You are a-okay! Keep going!

No, really, being imperfect is fine. Diminishing returns warn you that obsessing over perfection saps energy without delivering proportional benefits. Where’s the fun and gain in that? Recognize when “good enough” is good enough and sufficient. You are in it for the long game, not a three-week crash diet followed by a relapse. It’s about your long-term strategy, not your short-term tactics. Prioritize small, consistent steps. Your tactics are the meal prepping and workout scheduling. The strategy is to become stronger and healthier long-term. A one-off workout spree where you overexert and possibly injure yourself because you found the “perfect” routine—an advanced regimen for professional athletes, perhaps—does not serve you.

Break large goals into manageable chunks. Divide and conquer. This is your strategy dictating your tactics. If your objective is to tidy your room, concentrate on one drawer at a time. Eventually the entire place will be sparkling. Take a big effort and dissect it. This aligns with the least effort principle. You are wired to take the path of least resistance. Simplifying your environment and breaking tasks down reduces friction and makes behavior change more attainable. The easier it is to do the right thing, the higher the chances that you will.

Half-life in behavior reflects how quickly habits fade when not reinforced. To solidify change, you need consistency. Reinforce new habits regularly. Link those actions and rewards. Help your brain ingrain them. Eventually, you’ll tap into the compounding effect. Small, consistent changes lead to exponential results. Reading a few pages daily seems minor but results in incredible growth over the months and years. Stay on path. Do it for a while. The goals will achieve themselves.

Just make sure you are going in the right direction. Combine speed with alignment. Velocity emphasizes remaining on track while building momentum. For behavior change, this is parallel to those little, daily actions that contribute to meaningful outcomes long-term rather than rushing into unsustainable routines. Here you might want to exploit strengths-based thinking. Build on your existing strengths. That is a more effective way to improve than fixing weaknesses. Like, if you are naturally organized, use that skill to formulate structured plans and maximize your chances of success, instead of taking some artist’s advice that randomness fuels creativity. It might. But it’s not your strong suit. Climb the right mountain from the get-go.

Finally, concentrate your efforts where you can have the biggest impact. Look for actions where you achieve the highest effectiveness versus the energy required. High-impact, low-effort changes come first. These are quick, high-leverage habits that can almost instantaneously transform your life. Drinking water. Getting better sleep. Learning to resolve conflict. Taking short walks. Tick the basics before tackling more challenging, less result-oriented behaviors. Prioritize like your life depends on it. Because it does!