How to (Finally) Break That Bad Habit

James Clear, creator of Atomic Habits, provides that information is usually a good place to begin. “For fitness habits, it could be things like your Apple Watch or Whoop band or MyFitnessPal. There are many different ways to get data,” he says. “It also can be true for habits that maybe you wouldn’t think about tracking.” For instance, your calendar for the previous yr to decide whether or not you spent sufficient time at dwelling with your loved ones, or whether or not you had been touring for work an excessive amount of. “If you’re so busy that you never give yourself time to think about what you’re doing … it’s really hard to improve, because you’re just busy repeating the same thing again and again. You don’t have a chance to look at the bigger picture.”

Picking Your Habit, Digging Deeper, and Creating a Plan

Once you’ve accomplished your overview of the habits you’d like to break, it is best to choose one in all them to begin with.

“I look at a number of the challenges a patient is facing and then ask myself, ‘Which one is in the driver’s seat?’” says Mendelsohn. “Meaning if I tackle one of these problems, are the rest of them likely to get better?”

The subsequent step is to resolve the way you’re going to go about breaking the behavior you’ve chosen, based mostly in your historical past with it and the context or cues that lead to you performing the habits. Here are a number of examples:

Spending Too Much Money

Say you spend an excessive amount of cash and that is the behavior you desire to to cease. You’ve decided that you simply began overspending once you added your bank cards to your Apple Wallet or PayPal. This then made it extraordinarily straightforward to purchase issues once you noticed an advert on social media or a good friend despatched a hyperlink to one thing they thought you desire to. “You want spending money to be as difficult and thoughtful as possible,” Wood says. “Putting all your credit cards on your phone that you carry everywhere is counterproductive—you are further automating the process of spending money.” To repair this, you resolve to take away your playing cards from all on-line fee companies so every time you need to purchase one thing, you’ve got to bodily go and pull out the cardboard, which then offers you a bit extra time to take into consideration the acquisition itself. You may additionally ask buddies not to ship you merchandise and unsubscribe from any product advertising emails.

Checking Your Phone All The Time

If you’re attempting to test your telephone much less typically, David Kadavy, creator of Mind Management, Not Time Management, suggests locking it in a lockbox for a part of the day. “Make it as hard as possible to actually perform the habit,” he says. While you’re nonetheless going to get the cue to test your telephone, the hassle of going to the lockbox and unlocking it will possibly assist block the habits from triggering. Or, say you’re attempting to test social media much less typically: “Just delete the social media apps from your phone,” says Kadavy. “Block them with the parental controls or, at the very least, don’t have them on your home screen.”

Eating Unhealthily

Clear has an incredible instance of a unfavorable consuming behavior from his personal life. In the home he used to stay in, there was a McDonald’s proper after the freeway exit on his manner dwelling. He discovered himself stopping there a number of instances every week. “I looked at myself after the last one, and I was like, ‘Am I going to do this every time I drive home? Am I just going to stop here and eat here every single time?’” he says. “Ultimately, what I decided to do was to start taking a different path home. If I went left off of the exit instead of right, it would take an extra three minutes, but I wouldn’t pass the McDonald’s. I changed the environment so that I wouldn’t be exposed to the cue. That added enough friction and enough separation that the habit would change.”

Procrastinating

“A lot of people tend to procrastinate, then rely on anxiety and fear to motivate them to get tasks done,” says Mendelsohn. “This can be effective at getting things done, but at the cost of causing unnecessary stress. Breaking tasks down into smaller ones can be a harder strategy to implement at first, but more sustainable in the long run.” To assist you to get began, Mendelsohn suggests writing these duties down utilizing a pen and paper, as it may be “really helpful for people to keep their organizational strategies separate from the digital tools we use all day.”

Sometimes, substituting a unfavorable habits for a extra fascinating one can work at blocking it—however, Wood says you’ve got to know what the cue is, and the choice habits has to be each straightforward and rewarding. Say you’ve determined to drink a glass of water every time you’ve got the urge to have a look at your telephone, as a substitute of locking it away someplace or placing it facedown subsequent to you. “For most people, drinking a glass of water isn’t going to be as interesting as looking at their phones, so I don’t know if that’s going to work particularly well,” says Wood.

If your chosen manner to attempt to break your behavior isn’t working, perhaps it’s time to attempt one thing else. Another factor to take into account is that “for some specific behaviors, like quitting smoking, multiple attempts is actually a good thing,” Wood says. “Because most people who ultimately quit have to keep trying until they figure out the right thing that will work for them.”

So don’t get discouraged if it’s taking some time to break your behavior. Sometimes you simply want to method it a unique manner or dig deeper into the context or cues that lead you to carry out it within the first place.