Breaking Bad Habits: Recognize, Acknowledge, Control

A strategy to break away from a habitual activity is to:

Recognize your dependency
Acknowledge how the bad habit affects your life
Control the Cues to minimize triggers.

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MORE IDEAS ON THIS

Adding Friction To Bad Habits

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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Junk Food Habits

McDonald's, for example, uses brain science to create habits by:

Asking 'Would you like some fries with that?'
Keeping the restaurants' look and the food taste/color standardized to trigger habitual eating patterns.
The salt and sugar in the fo...

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Companies and Habits

Companies make us habitual. Companies like Facebook, Netflix, and Uber spend millions on R&D of better tools to minimize friction, to get people to use their services more and more and form a habit.

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Knowledge is not Enough When It Comes To Bad Habits

Just merely knowing something is good or bad for you is not going to give you any benefit, unless the implementation is done. Conscious knowledge cannot change your behavior, one has to make necessary changes to successfully act in self-control.

If you know that you will eat junk foo...

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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 make the required change seep into us, turning it into a machine-like, habitual behavior.

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