3 Steps to Build Unfuckwithable Habits
Sebastian Schumacher
Having an impact on peoples lifes is Sebastians deepest passion. He does so by combining his knowledge in Human Behavior with Biohacking to create lasting and powerful changes. Since the Age of 16, Sebastian is involved in the area of human performance. His expertise comes from his scientific background as well as his years of experience in coaching and consulting. He studied Sports and Performance at one of Europes Leading Sport Universities. His areas of specification are Sport psychology and Nutrition. His work at Ahead helps Achievers to tap into their full potential - Being Ahead is about the Impact!
How would your life look like if you applied everything you know? How many things do you KNOW, that would change your life if you would utilize them? Everybody knows that you can only reap the rewards of our knowledge when you put things into action. But most people never form a new habit because they don’t know how do it. This talk will reveal to you the hidden forces that play a role in habit formation. You will learn how to make ANY Biohack work for you. You will realize that sticking to a habit has nothing to do with willpower. It is all about knowing how to design a habit in the right way. If you apply the three simple and fundamental steps you can turn any behavior into an unfuckwithable habit. Would it be okay for you to learn how to change your habits easily and thereby change your life forever?
Building lasting habits has nothing to do with willpower; it is about understanding how to design behavior. Install a trigger that reminds you, make the behavior as simple as possible, and design your motivation by focusing on what you will gain.
Summary
- Building lasting habits depends on the interaction of three forces—motivation, ability, and triggers—rather than relying on willpower alone. - Designing environmental triggers is essential to remind oneself to perform a new behavior, preventing it from being forgotten. - Increasing ability requires making a behavior simple by minimizing the time, money, physical energy, and mental effort required to complete it. - Social alignment facilitates habit formation, as support from others reduces the effort needed to justify or defend new behaviors. - Motivation can be designed by focusing on a long-term vision and linking positive emotions to the behavior instead of focusing on the pain of sacrifice.
Article
At Biohacker Summit 2019, Sebastian Schumacher Argued That Lasting Habits Are Built, Not Willed
Three Steps, One Hard Truth
At Biohacker Summit 2019 in Helsinki, Finland, Sebastian Schumacher delivered a brisk, sharp presentation with an unforgettable title: *3 Steps to Build Unfuckwithable Habits*. Beneath the provocation was a message of almost austere practicality. Human beings, he told the audience on Friday, 1 November 2019, do not transform their lives through heroic reserves of willpower. They change when behavior is designed so well that action becomes easier than avoidance.
Schumacher, whose background spans human behavior, sport psychology and nutrition, framed habit formation not as a moral struggle but as a systems problem. If people fail to sustain a new routine, the cause is rarely weakness of character. More often, the routine was badly constructed from the start.
His thesis rested on three forces: trigger, ability and motivation. Get them into alignment, he suggested, and ambitious change becomes not merely possible but repeatable. Ignore them, and even the noblest intentions collapse within days.
The False Religion Of Willpower
Schumacher began with a familiar scene: the surge of inspiration that follows a conference, a book, a diagnosis, a birthday, a crisis. People leave determined to become better versions of themselves. Then ordinary life resumes, and the transformation evaporates.
To show why, he introduced two fictional biohackers, Tom and Ella. Both wanted to improve their health. Both chose swimming. But where Ella committed to a modest thirty-minute swim every other day in a lake behind her house, Tom chose something so extravagant it bordered on absurdity: a ninety-kilometre swim from Helsinki to Tallinn twice a week.
The contrast was comic, but the point was serious. Both shared the same goal. Only one had selected a behavior that could survive contact with reality.
“Motivation and ability go together because the higher the ability required to perform a behavior, the more motivation you need to follow through,” Schumacher said.
This was the quiet demolition of a culture that romanticises effort. The harder the habit, the more inspiration it demands. And inspiration, unlike design, is unstable.
The Trigger Comes First
The first place to intervene, Schumacher argued, is the trigger. Not the grand ambition, not the emotional speech one gives oneself, but the simple prompt that makes a behavior happen in the moment it might otherwise be forgotten.
“The best place to adjust your behavior is starting with the trigger. Design your environment in a way where it reminds you to follow through,” he said.
Ella, in his example, understood this instinctively. The night before her swim, she placed her bathing suit and goggles beside her alarm clock. When morning came, she did not have to remember a promise she had made to herself. The environment remembered for her.
It is a deceptively small idea, and perhaps that is why it matters. So much of self-improvement culture is built around intensity. Schumacher’s insight was that continuity often depends on something humbler: a cue visible at the exact moment action should begin.
In that sense, habit is not a battle of character. It is architecture.
Simplicity Is A Form Of Power
If the trigger initiates action, ability determines whether the action is realistic enough to repeat. Schumacher treated simplicity not as laziness but as strategic intelligence.
“Increasing your ability to maintain a habit really comes down to making the behavior as simple as possible,” he said.
He broke simplicity into five dimensions: time, money, physical effort, brain energy and social defiance. Together they formed a more complete picture of why some habits take root while others die.
Time matters because a behavior that expands to fill half a day soon begins to compete with every other obligation. Money matters because repeated expense introduces friction. Physical effort matters because exhaustion compounds resistance. Brain energy matters because complicated planning can kill a routine before it starts. And social defiance matters because habits performed against the grain of family or friends require a further, often invisible, expenditure of effort.
Ella’s habit scored well on nearly all counts. It was quick, free, physically manageable, logistically simple and socially supported. Tom’s fantasy swim was the opposite: long, punishing, mentally cumbersome and opposed by those around him.
Schumacher’s framework was compelling precisely because it was unsentimental. The best habit is not the one that sounds impressive when announced. It is the one that can be done again tomorrow.
Motivation Must Be Designed, Too
The final force was motivation, which Schumacher described not as a magical resource but as something that can be shaped by attention and meaning.
“When you link pleasure to a behavior, it will be easier for you to follow through; focus on everything you will gain and how amazing you will feel,” he said.
This was not a call for empty positivity. It was a recognition that the brain moves toward reward and recoils from pain. If a person frames a habit entirely in terms of sacrifice, deprivation and lost freedom, resistance becomes almost inevitable.
“If you focus on everything you have to sacrifice, your brain will find ways to avoid the pain. Instead, create an exciting vision that carries you through,” Schumacher added.
Again, Ella and Tom stood as mirrors. Ella imagined vitality, satisfaction and a future self still diving in the Philippines after retirement. Tom fixated on what he would lose: time with his son, evenings with friends, ordinary pleasures surrendered to an impossible regime.
The difference was not merely emotional tone. It was endurance. One vision generated energy. The other drained it.
A Theory Of Change For Real Life
What made Schumacher’s talk resonate at the Biohacker Summit 2019 event was that it translated a familiar frustration into a usable model. Many people know what they want to change. Far fewer know how to construct a behavior that can withstand forgetfulness, fatigue, cost, inconvenience and social pressure.
His answer was disarmingly clear. Start with the trigger. Lower the barrier to action. Attach the routine to pleasure and purpose.
In the question-and-answer session, Schumacher extended the logic beyond personal habits into product design. If customers already want something, he said, the task is then to make access easier and to create the right prompts for action. The same principles that govern individual behavior can govern markets. Motivation matters, but ease and timing often decide the outcome.
It was a useful reminder that habit science is not confined to gym bags and alarm clocks. It shapes what people buy, eat, click and repeat.
Be Like Ella
The most memorable line of the talk arrived at the end, when Schumacher reduced the whole framework to a simple exhortation: be like Ella.
It was a light ending, but not a trivial one. Ella represented a kind of disciplined modesty that modern culture frequently undervalues. She chose a behavior small enough to survive. She placed a cue where she could not miss it. She removed friction. She let support in. She tied the act to a future she wanted.
In an era addicted to transformation narratives, Schumacher’s presentation offered something quieter and perhaps more durable. Lasting change, he suggested, does not begin with dramatic reinvention. It begins with a habit made obvious, easy and worth repeating.
That may be less glamorous than willpower. But in Helsinki, on a cold November day at Biohacker Summit 2019, Sebastian Schumacher made it sound like the only method that ever truly worked.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki