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Can't Kick a Bad Habit? You're Probably Doing It Wrong
Kicking a bad habit
- Identify the behavior you want to stop: e.g, not eating processed sugar.
- Choose one specific food to cut from your diet. It needs to be something you wouldn’t miss.
- Diets don’t work because they are temporary fixes. To become part of your identity, the commitment needs to be forever.
- Write down what you no longer eat and the date you gave it up. Writing this down marks the shift from a temporary “can’t” to a permanent “don’t.”
- If the commitment feels like too much, you’re doing too much.
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Starting vs breaking a habit
The process of stopping bad habits is fundamentally different from forming new ones.
- Creating a habit requires encoding a new set of automatic behaviors: the brain learns causal relationships between triggers that prompt action and the associated outcome.
- The popular belief is that the key to breaking a bad habit is replacing it with another habit. But this doesn't always work.
Progressive extremism
The process of “progressive extremism” utilizes what we know about the psychology of identity to help stop behaviors we don’t want. It works particularly well in situations in which substituting one habit for another just won’t do.
Identity helps us make otherwise difficult choices by offloading willpower. Our choices become what we do because of who we are.
"Don’t" vs "Can’t"
By classifying specific behaviors as things you will never do again, you put certain actions into the realm of “I don’t” versus “I can’t.”
Saying “I don’t” rather than “I can’t” provides greater “psychological empowerment.”
Kicking a bad habit
- Identify the behavior you want to stop: e.g, not eating processed sugar.
- Choose one specific food to cut from your diet. It needs to be something you wouldn’t miss.
- Diets don’t work because they are temporary fixes. To become part of your identity, the commitment needs to be forever.
- Write down what you no longer eat and the date you gave it up. Writing this down marks the shift from a temporary “can’t” to a permanent “don’t.”
- If the commitment feels like too much, you’re doing too much.
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The Paleo Diet
The Paleo Diet is an effort to go back to eating how we’re biologically designed to eat, allowing us to tap into our genetic potential and start living healthier immediately.
Lose weight on the Paleo Diet
- Eat fewer calories than you burn every day.
- Eat mostly real food if you want to be healthy.
- Do those two things consistently for a decade to KEEP the weight off.
When you only eat real food and avoid all unhealthy food, you’re more likely than not going to run a caloric deficit – and thus lose weight.
Eat the following:
- Meat – GRASS-FED, not grain-fed.
- Fowl – Chicken, duck, hen, turkey.
- Fish – Wild fish, as mercury and other toxins can be an issue in farmed fish
- Eggs – Omega-3 enriched cage free eggs.
- Vegetables – As long as they’re not deep-fried, eat as many as you want.
- Oils – Olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil – think natural.
- Fruits – Fruits have natural sugar, and can be higher in calories, so limit if you’re trying to lose weight.
- Nuts – High in calories, so they’re good for a snack only.
- Tubers – Sweet potatoes and yams. Higher in calories and carbs.
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Building habits
The basic process for building all habits is basically the same: you repeatedly condition the behavior you want, over time, until it becomes automatic.
But no habit starts out auto...
Conditioning a habit
- Classical conditioning: a paired association with a trigger and a behavior. Going to the gym after you wake up each morning is this kind of habit.
- Operant conditioning: you not only associate a trigger with a behavior, but you reward that pairing, to accelerate the habit-forming process.
The 30-Day Trial
You commit to some change for 30 days, then tou can go back to your old ways. But having spent thirty days applying a new behavior is often enough to convince you to stick with it.
Pros:
- Can handle more significant/difficult behavior changes you might be unlikely to start with a perpetual commitment.
- Fosters an experimental mindset, rather than assuming you already know what’s best.
Cons:
- 30 days probably isn’t enough to actually make something a habit.
- Without a long-term plan, many 30-day trials will revert back to the original behavior.
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Struggling To Build Healthy Habits
- We tend to bite off more than we can chew, go too fast too soon, and then get overwhelmed too quickly.
- We’re conditioned these days to expect and receive instant gratification.
Your “Big Why”
As you’re determining the habits or resolutions you’re trying to set, make the habit part of a bigger cause that’s worth the struggle.
You’re not just going to the gym, you’re building a new body that you’re not ashamed of so you can start dating again.
Healthy Habit Building 101
There are 3 parts to a good or bad habit: Cue (what triggers the action), Routine (the action itself), Reward (the positive result because of the action).
You have trained your brain to take a cue (you see a doughnut), anticipate a reward (a sugar high), and make the behavior automatic (nom that donut).Compare that to a cue (you see your running shoes), anticipate a reward (a runner’s high), and make the behavior automatic (go for a run!).
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