Goals: We make them, we break them. It’s easy to make the decision to change your behavior, only to regress once some actual work is involved. Everyone has something they’re trying to change about themselves, whether it’s exercising more, flossing daily, journaling continuously or giving up certain guilty pleasures.

My vice was cherry Diet Coke. There was nothing better than that mid-afternoon stroll to the company fridge and the quick caffeine pick-me-up to get me through the last few hours of the workday.

But I’d read all the scary studies (Diet Coke would increase my risk of cancer, no one knows what the fake sugar is doing to our bodies, it’ll stain your teeth, you’ll become addicted to the caffeine), and so I decided to quit. I did alright for a few days, nursing a cup of tea instead of soda during the mid-afternoon slump. But then a particularly stressful day rolled around, and I was back chugging the stuff, with a constant mantra of “I deserve this” running through my head. I knew I needed something extra to nudge me toward my goal. I started looking around online and found Lift.

Lift is an app that helps you form (or break) habits. It has a simple design and user interface; simply enter in the list of habits you want to form, and at the end of the day, swipe right to check off the ones you successfully completed. The app resets at midnight and keeps track of how many days per week or month you successfully achieve your goal.

That’s it. There’s a sharing component that I never utilized, which might be good motivation for some. But for me, the satisfaction of checking off the habit every day was enough motivation to stick with it. It’s amazing that such a small action successfully works as motivation, but it does. Making the conscious decision to skip the soda or treat so that I can check it off my list of habits is incredibly effective.

Lift is available for iOS or online, and is free to download. I used Lift for about a month to cut down on Diet Coke and start weight-lifting regularly. Once I felt I had successfully formed a new habit (in this case, to NOT drink Diet Coke mid-day), I stopped using the app. And I’ve been pretty good, only ordering soda at restaurants occasionally. It’s amazing how powerful a tiny reward can be when in kicking or form habits. Now that I’ve got my Diet Coke fix under control, I need to decide what to tackle next. And when I do decide (late-night snacking? getting up right when my alarm goes off?), I will turn to Lift to help me along the way.

Written by Liz Wassmann 

Liz Wassmann is on the Dot Complicated editorial team and has written for a variety of Bay Area publications over the past several years. When she’s not reading or writing, she can be found daydreaming about her next trip overseas and practicing parallel parking.

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