Your habits are compounding. Both the good and bad ones.
Each day, your actions either support or sabotage you.
Destructive habits spread faster because they deliver relief before the cost appears.
It almost always starts as a reward: something you gave yourself permission to do just once. It could be a bad day at work, feeling sick or sad… whatever.
Initially, it feels harmless, but this is how bad habits begin.
Every habit has a trigger, and the trigger is almost never the habit you think you are trying to fix.
Say you rewarded yourself with a chocolate because you felt sad. Now you automatically built a connection in your brain that connects feeling sad with eating a chocolate.
It is very likely that starting from this point onward you will think of eating a chocolate each time you start feeling down.
Like I said, it starts harmless. I mean, how much damage a few chocolates can do? The problem starts if you keep repeating it for a longer period of time as it can lead to weight gain and obesity, which also often makes people feel sad.
That is how a reward becomes a trap.
The sequence is almost embarrassingly simple once you write it out, which is exactly why it is so hard to interrupt.
The worst thing about habits is that it is extremely difficult to get rid of them. I believe that it is impossible to get rid of a bad habit – you can only control it.
Say you smoke cigarettes (or at least you know someone who does).
Almost everyone who smokes has quit at least once, which tells you everything about how the loop works. Some of them achieve their goal which is fantastic, however for sure you know someone who was not smoking for a long period of time and got back to this destructive habit.
Most of the time, it’s because they were caught off guard on a weak day, repeating the cycle.
The same loop that keeps you reaching for chocolate is the one Duolingo engineered into every streak notification.
Duolingo does not sell language learning, it sells the feeling of not wanting to break the chain, and that is a completely different product.
Once you miss a day it will give you a “freeze”, so you don’t lose your streak and stay with the platform.
Once you lose your streak it is very likely that you will stop using the app again or lose interest.
So when do the habits actually start to fade?
The answer turns out to be more precise than you would expect.
Once you miss a streak for two days in a row, it becomes a strong signal that you are losing interest in a given activity. I learnt it from the book “Atomic Habits” where it is mentioned that it is okay to skip a day, but never skip twice in a row. This is where habits break.
That exact threshold explains why most apps lose users after one skipped week.
I learned this the wrong way first: I built a tool asking people to deliver a speech each day. I thought that it would be a brilliant idea – same as Duolingo did. The thing is that no one wants to do such practises each day. They want the outcome but they are not attracted by the habit I tried to introduce into their life.
The lesson I learn was a very valuable one. Always build on top of an existing loop and you skip the hardest part of any product: convincing someone to care.
When the habit already exists, your product does not need to convince anyone of anything. It needs to be in the right place at the right time.
This principle of compounding applies to products as well. The ones that survive are not the ones that built new habits from scratch. They are the ones that quietly attached themselves to the loops already running in your head.