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Want to Break a Bad Habit? Science Says Do These 4 Things
Identify The Stages
First identify the cue, routine, and reward that lead to your habit. Look at the circumstances surrounding the behavior including the time of day, who you're with, and what emotions you're feeling.
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Anticipate Setbacks
Behavior change is hard. Slip-ups are common, so when they happen, don't beat yourself up or retreat into negative self-talk. Instead, anticipate your failures and plan for them.
Commit To Change And Tweak as You Go
Make achievable commitments to test new routines and approach it as a series of experiments.
Try your new routine for a while and tweak it or switch to a new one if it doesn’t suit you.
Explore Alternatives
Once you have a clear breakdown of what's happening at each stage of your habit loop, brainstorm healthier routines that will produce the results you want.
Create a list of options of alternatives that might provide comparable reward to the one you are trying to eliminate. Focus on new routines that will help you decompress after a stressful day (the cue) and leave you in a positive frame of mind to get freelance work done (reward).
Identify The Stages
First identify the cue, routine, and reward that lead to your habit. Look at the circumstances surrounding the behavior including the time of day, who you're with, and what emotions you're feeling.
The Psychology Of Bad Habits
Habits are comprised of cue, routine and reward. The cue triggers a routine, and the routine generates a reward.
The habit loop is powerful and hardwired into our psyches, which explains why it is so hard to shake. We actually never break bad habits, but replace them with more positive alternatives.
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Chunking - The Root of Habits
The process in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine is known as ‘chunking,’ and it’s at the root of how habits form.
Habits emerge...
...because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
It will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often. This effort-saving instinct is a huge advantage.
The 3 Step Loop of Habit Formation:
- First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use.
- Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional.
- Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.
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Willpower is Limited
Though companies like Nike try to ignite our willpower with their slogans, ultimately willpower cannot squash our subconscious and unconscious behavior.
Repetition of action and thought can m...
Knowledge is not Enough
If you know that you will eat junk food because your refrigerator is filled with it, remove all the junk food.
Friction
Just as removing friction aids in doing the activity more often, adding friction can aid to remove the bad habit, by making it difficult or cumbersome to do so.
Example: Cigarette smoking declined due to adding taxes, banning in public places and removing from vending machines.
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Set Better Goals
Be specific on how you’ll implement goals into your daily life. Examining how you’ve responded to the situation in the past and determining what you can do to avoid reverting to the old h...
Have a Better Reason For Quitting
Even if you replace a “bad” habit with a better one, sometimes the original vice will have a stronger biological “reward” than its substitute. This is where the importance of having an intrinsic motivation comes into play.
If that is the case, find as many benefits to the change as you can and try to use them as extra motivation.
Replace a Bad Habit With a Good One
The more you suppress your thoughts, the more likely you are to think about that thought or even revert back to that bad habit. Instead of trying to stop doing something, it’s easier to do something else.
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