5 Steps to Breaking bad habits

With the start of a new year our thoughts naturally are drawn to a review of the last year and what we hope to achieve in the new.

We consider some resolutions, and I have a post on forming new habits. But the converse of that is stopping BAD habits. If you can change your behaviour to dispense with those habits you no longer desire.

OK, we all know habits are formed when you do something over and over again, unconsciously, which is great if you want them. The problem is when you end up with a bad habit because you start repeating a behaviour you don’t want without necessarily realising it. If you want to get rid of this behaviour, the first thing you need to do is figure out it’s trigger so you’re aware, conscious of it, and can start making changes.

bad habits

So how do you change a habit? By diagnosing it’s components, and programming the behaviour. Here’s 5 steps how to do just that:

1. Identify your bad habit’s routine

There is a basic pattern at the core of every habit, a kind of neurological loop that has three parts: A cue, a routine and a reward.

To understand your habit, you need to identify the components of your loop. The easiest place to start is with the routine: what behaviour do you want to change? (For instance, I once had a bad habit of eating chocolate from a stash of sweets in another work department every afternoon.)

2. Experiment with different rewards

Rewards are powerful because they satisfying our cravings. But we’re often not conscious of the cravings that drive our behaviours. To figure out which cravings are driving particular habits, it’s useful to experiment with different rewards. For instance, on the first day of my experiment to figure out what was driving my chocolate habit, when I felt the urge to go wander the halls to discover my chocolate fix,  instead went outside, walked around the block, and then went back to my desk without eating anything. The next day, I went to 7Eleven bought some chocolate and ate it at my desk. The next day, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with my friends. Eventually I figured out that what I was really craving wasn’t chocolate, but people: Whenever I wandered in search of chocolate, I chatted with my colleagues.

3. Isolate the cue

Every habit has a cue, and experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories:

  • Location
  • Time
  • Emotional State
  • Other People
  • Immediately preceding action

So, if you’re trying to figure out the cue for the ‘going in search of chocolate’ habit, you write down five things the moment the urge hits (these are my actual notes from when I was trying to diagnose my habit):

  • Where are you? (sitting at my desk)
  • What time is it? (2:36 pm)
  • What’s your emotional state? (bored, tired)
  • Who else is around? (no one)
  • What action preceded the urge? (finished a part if a work project)
  • After just a few days, it was pretty clear which cue was triggering my chocolate habit — I felt an urge to get a snack at a certain time of day. The habit, I had figured out, was triggered between 2:00 and 3:00pm.

4. Have a plan

Once you’ve figured out your habit loop — you’ve identified the reward driving your behaviour, the cue triggering it, and the routine itself — you can begin to shift the behaviour. You can change to a better routine by planning for the cue, and choosing a behaviour that delivers the reward you are craving. What you need is a plan.

A habit is a formula our brain automatically follows:

When I see CUE, I will do a ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD.

So, I wrote a plan of my own:

At 2:30, every day, I will walk twice around the office and chat with a free colleague for 5 minutes.

It didn’t work immediately. But, eventually, it got be automatic. It occurred almost without me thinking about it. It had become a habit.

5. Look for ‘keystone habits’

Our lives are filled with habits, and time is limited. Knowing how to improve behaviours doesn’t resolve a central question: where to begin? To lose weight, Is it better to create an exercise habit, or reform eating patterns? Should someone focus on procrastination?  Or everything at the same time?

The answer is to focus on ‘keystone habits.’ Some habits, say researchers, are more important than others because they have the power to provide invaluable information or to start a positive chain reaction, shifting other patterns as they move through our lives.  Keystone habits influence how we work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.

Identifying keystone habits, however, is tricky. To find them, you have to know where to look.

To begin, ask yourself a central question: which habits are most core to my self image? Take for example if you are overweight, is it a result of a lack of exercise or inappropriate eating habits? Does exercise make you think about yourself in a different – and better – way? Then exercise might be your keystone habit. Or is it what and how you eat? That might be your keystone habit.

For me, the keystone habit was dietary. I lived a busy lifestyle and would struggle to find time to exercise to compensate for the calories I took in. The habit I changed was to keep a food log, I wrote down everything i ate, both to stop unconsciously eating and later to identify what I was eating. Writing my food log became a conscious habit. Simply by doing this for a week and then a month I saw where my problem lay.

And so I changed by eating habits. I changed my diet to exclude carbs, exclude dairy, no salt, no sugar.  This change of dietary habit enabled me to change the way I looked I reduced the amount I ate to balance the amount of exercise I could do, and so reduced my weight,  By addressing diet as the keystone habit i was able to change.

This same principle can be applied to all kinds of other behaviours — figure out the keystone habits in your life, and use them to create other, better patterns. When you drink too much, for instance, does it set off a series of other bad habits? When you start to keep a careful track of your credit card use, do you find that it creates better patterns, like considering having a discretionary budget, or committing to spend only $X per month, or doing a better job of paying credit card bills on time to avoid interest? When you exercise early in the morning do you feel positive, empowered from the rest of the day, capable to overcoming all other temptations? If you identify keystone habits, you can remake what you automatically eat, how you unthinkingly get work done, and how you subconsciously engage with your kids and friends.

Your Keystone habits offer an insight into patterns of behaviour that either create a positive or negative feedback loop. Keystone habits can therefore encourage personal change in three important ways.

  • First, keystone habits produce small wins. Small wins are accomplishments that stimulate larger, transformative changes. A series of small wins can leverage modest advantages into patterns that convince people that larger achievements are possible. Small wins convert cumulative successes into routines.
  • Second, keystone habits provide feedback on how to create other positive habits and create change by creating a successful model for your own behaviour change.
  • Third, keystone habits can create a personal approach that embodies new values. Particularly during times of stress can make your decision making an automatically positive to your plan.

Here’s an example of Michael Phelps and how he looked at his habits preparing to swim to build winning into a habit

So its new years day, have you any bad habits you want to break, why not use this 5 step plan to change, and when you succeed let us know.