Two Techniques for Breaking Bad Habits
What is keeping you from making effective changes in your life?
If you have tried to make changes in your life and failed over and over again, the culprit may be a habit that takes over when “you’re not looking.” Do you automatically drink your coffee first thing in the morning? Do you drive to work without thinking about your route? If you perform the same behavior over and over, it will become a habit.
Habits serve a useful purpose: to meet some goal in the most efficient way possible while taking up as few cognitive resources as possible. If you think of your brain as a computer, then a habit is like a process that your computer runs in the background. Because you’ve performed this behavior many times before, your brain doesn’t need to invest a lot of resources in it, which frees up your mind to focus on things that require more effortful attention. This is a good thing, right?
If you’ve formed some positive habits in your life such as brushing your teeth or eating fruit every day, then there is no problem. Those good habits “run in the background” and serve to fulfill your goals while not taking up many cognitive resources, leaving you free to use your brain for other things. However, perhaps you have some bad habits that either you’ve outgrown or that were never good to begin with. Maybe you’re not 18 years old anymore but you still eat as if you have the metabolism of an 18-year-old, a habit that you created in college 20 years ago, but which no longer works now that you’re older. Maybe you bite your nails, a habit that you started when you were 10 when you were worried about a test in school, but which is now stuck with you.
Whatever the bad habit that you want to change is, there are two things you can do to change it and create a better habit. Before I get into that, we need to understand how habitual behaviors are activated.
How Habitual Behaviors are Activated
Cues in your environment activate your habit. When you are in the right environment, the features of that environment activate the set of behaviors that you have performed over and over again in that environment. For example, the minute you get in your car, you turn on the radio. You don’t think about it but being in the car triggers this behavior because that’s what you’ve done before. If you are on a train for some reason, that particular context will not trigger the behavior to automatically turn on the radio (which is a good thing because people will think you strange for pressing imaginary buttons in front of you). So, if you have created a habitual behavior, the desire to perform that habitual behavior will be activated every time you are in some particular environment. You may not necessarily perform this behavior every time (as, for example, when something gets in the way of you doing it) but it will be activated in your brain nonetheless.
Can the behavior be overridden? Of course. We do this all the time. If, for some reason, you are getting in your car with your mother, you suppress the behavior to turn on the radio because you know that she never really got into Nine Inch Nails quite like you did.
To override or suppress that automatic behavior, you pay a steep price in the form of expending cognitive resources. You can do this only so often before you revert back to your automatic behaviors. It requires constant vigilance and expends a significant amount of energy to suppress an automatic behavior every single time. Think of it as having to suck in your gut for some amount of time. How long can you hold in your gut before you’re worn out and have to release it? This is why most people can’t sustain a diet, an exercise routine, or fulfill their New Year’s resolutions. After you’ve used up the initial burst of energy to begin a new habit, the old habit resumes because it requires no energy to run (like those background processes on your computer).
So what can be done to change a habit? Two things: 1) planning, and 2) changing the situation.
Planning
In order for planning to be effective, you have to link a new behavior to the situation that is always activating your old, habitual behavior. To create the new behavior, you need to form an implementation intention first.
An implementation intention is an intention that is specific in nature: it tells you when, where, and how you will achieve a certain goal. Unlike a vague goal intention such as, “I want to exercise more,” an implementation intention is one that is specific: “I will run on the treadmill at 6 am tomorrow.”
After forming an implementation intention, when you encounter the situation, now both the implementation intention and the desire to perform the habitual behavior ought to be activated and are competing for dominance. Which behavior will win? Will you perform your habitual behavior or the new, planned behavior? Let’s say that every time you pass a Dunkin’ Donuts on your way to work, you have to stop and get a doughnut. But if you’ve planned first by forming an implementation intention that says something like, “I will stop at the bagel shop next to Dunkin’ Donuts and get a whole grain bagel instead of my doughnut,” then when you are driving by, the thought that you will get the bagel instead of a doughnut ought to be prominent in your mind. This will make it more likely that you will actually carry out your planned behavior rather than the old behavior. If you keep doing this - creating specific intentions ahead of time - pretty soon, you will have replaced the bad habit with a better habit. This will not work every time. If you’re distracted or upset or in a hurry, you might revert to your old behavior of stopping for that doughnut. Breaking bad habits is a difficult task, but at least this technique will help you work towards that goal.
Changing the Situation
The second way to break a habit is by changing the situation. Remember our example of automatically turning on the radio whenever you get in the car? If you suddenly find yourself on the train, the situation has changed and you will no longer be able to turn on the radio. That’s a simple example but let’s see how this can apply to bad habits that you want to break. Let’s go back to our Dunkin’ Donuts example. Instead of stopping at the bagel place next to the Dunkin’ Donuts, you can change the situation by taking a different route, thus avoiding seeing Dunkin’ Donuts on your way to work.
Can’t stop yourself from overeating whenever you go to a buffet? Stop going to the buffet and you won’t overeat. This is easier to do than telling yourself that this time you won’t overeat at the buffet. Can’t stop surfing the web instead of working? Uninstall your web browser and you’ll be unable to do this. (Yeah, I know. You need your browser to do your job. Sure you do.) Remember that the environment elicits your habitual behavior and you expend cognitive resources exerting self-control to override the habitual behavior so it’s easier to change the environment than to exert the self-control.
At my last job, I used to open Outlook the minute I got in to work and then shut it down right before I left. That little envelope that used to pop up in the lower right corner wouldn’t leave me alone. I just had to check the email to see who was writing to me. Then, after I saw who was writing to me, I just had to answer it immediately. The result? Predictably, I would get further and further away from the work I was supposed to be doing. I stopped this habit by changing the situation. I started closing Outlook so that the little envelope wouldn’t elicit my automatic behavior. I began to open Outlook only periodically throughout the day. No envelope, no automatic behavior to click on it. This led to higher productivity and control of my emails.
These two techniques are not foolproof; they still require thought, repetition, follow-through and some self-control but they do give you a method for working on breaking your bad habits.
What bad habits do you want to break? How can you use these techniques to help you?
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment