Breaking bad habits can sometimes seem like a herculean task. And for someone scared, frustrated with no guidance, it was. All habits fall under the same laws and rules of conditioning and counter-conditioning. So applying these same rules will assist in breaking habit.
- Work on your Environment
Habits consist of three parts: cue, routine, reward
Which tells the brain to go into routine. Which is the actual performance of the habit, and the reward. The reward here is the satisfaction from performing the routine.
It’s like you walking down the streets and spotting an ice-cream stand (cue). You immediately walk over there and get double chocolate ice cream balls. You start taking it (routine) and as soon as the sweet taste of ice cold chocolate hits your tongue, you feel the ecstasy (reward).
Environmental design is all about changing your environment so that you don’t experience the cue at all.
In the case above, it won’t be feasible to say don’t walk down the street where they sell the ice cream. So another way around it would be leaving your money at home.
As long as you can make the environment go in your favor as much as possible, it will be easier to drop the bad habit. If you eat cookies at night, stop buying them. Same applies to alcohol or soda
If you can eliminate the environment which pushes you into the habit you’re trying to break, you have already done half of the work.
- Start Small, As Small As Possible
It is impossible to shut down your bad habits immediately. You will have several failed attempts. It’s more about how you manage yourself after you fall down. The one night you took alcohol is bad, but what’s worse is if you drop the attempt to stop taking alcohol altogether just because you failed.
The steps that you take when shutting down bad habits needs to be small and you need to be as consistent as possible.
To be feasible, you need to start small and work your way “down”. Start slowly, lowering the dose of the habit in question.
- Track and Measure
This is the golden rule when it comes to anything breaking bad habits. You need to track and measure your progress.
You do what you track and you improve what you measure. The tracker doesn’t have to be anything complicated. It can be hand written or use an excel sheet.
When you have a tracker, you can look back and feel proud of the progress and work that you managed in the past. This will make you motivated to keep making the same decisions over and over again. Effectively shutting down the bad habit.
- Change Your Identity
When you smoke, you don’t simply perform the action of smoking. You have an identity behind that action-you are a smoker.
When you eat excessively, you don’t simply perform that action. You have an identity behind that action- you are obese.
This is why it’s so hard to make changes when it comes to habits. We are literally losing (transforming)a part of ourselves when we change. The way that we change this is by removing our identity from the action that we are doing. When you remove your identity from the action that you’re doing, then losing the habits becomes easy. because you no longer identify with that behavior, it becomes just something that you do.
Breaking bad habits doesn’t have to feel like drudgery. It can be really uplifting and satisfying if you implement the strategies mentioned above.
