How to Break Bad Habits: Strategies for Success

Make it Invisible

You often indulge in a bad habit after something reminds you of it. Erasing these triggers will reduce the amount of times you are reminded of the habit you are trying to forget. An easy way to eliminate triggers is to clean your day-to-day environment from them. For example, if you are trying to play less video games, keeping a gaming console in your room wouldn’t be smart. Every time you walk into your room, the gaming console reminds you of video games, making you more likely to play them.

A study by Mischel et al. (1972) published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on kids' ability to delay gratification, was based on the premise that if a kid could resist eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes, they would receive another marshmallow; a bigger reward after resisting the temptation. The researchers found that if the marshmallow was hidden, the kids were twice as likely to avoid eating it, and if they did eat it, they resisted their urge much longer.

We can utilize these findings by removing the more obvious triggers that are the easiest to remove. Remind yourself that removing something is better than removing nothing. Take your time and space out your removals. Going cold turkey at once is less likely to be sustainable and is harder to do.

Make it Unattractive

If you believe something to be enjoyable, it is much harder not to do. Reframe your mindset to view the habit you want to remove from a negative lens. Do this by writing your habit at the top of a page. Every time you make the habit, under where you wrote it, list one way it worsens your life. Next to how it made your life worse, write how your life would be better if you didn’t do it. Third, rewrite a scenario where you didn’t make the habit and visualize yourself going through that time without indulging. Remember to be specific and realistic, and you must believe what you are writing for this exercise to work. Additionally, if you don’t have the energy or the time to do all three columns, pick the one that you feel will help you the most and do that one. Again, the principle that more is better applies here; even just a sentence will get you closer to overcoming this habit.

Make it Difficult

The more energy it takes for you to be able to do your habit, the less often you will do it. If you increase the difficulty of reaching your habit, there will be more times when you feel like doing it but not enough to go through all the effort. For example, if you constantly find yourself on your phone, try giving yourself a really long password. The inconvenience of the password is its power. Now when you pull out your phone to scroll, social media won’t immediately appear in front of your eyes. There will be a gap between the feeling and the actual doing. During this gap, you can try to fight the feeling. The more friction and steps you can add to get into your habit, the better. Eventually, you will get into the habit of not doing it after all those times of not going after it pile up. Try contacting a friend or family member to help you increase friction. For example, hand someone your phone when you want to study and tell them not to give it back to you until you show them your completed assignment. Unless you are willing to try to convince them otherwise and beg for your phone, you will be forced to work.

Make it Unsatisfying

Make the negative impact of your habit more obvious and quicker. The negative effects of bad habits are often slow and gradual. But they still exist. Make these effects pop out to you, and add a negative feeling to doing them. For example, if you find yourself eating too much junk food, you can go for a run after the indulgence of eating. The harder and more painful the run is, the better (while staying safe). If your brain connects eating junk food to a difficult run, it will stop craving it since the overall experience is negative. Make the experience of doing the habit a negative one, and you will naturally avoid it.

Citations

Mischel, W., Ebbesen, E. B., & Zeiss, A. R. (1972). Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 21(2), 204-218.

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