How To Get Rid Of Bad Habits

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Understanding Habit Loops: How to Break Bad Habits Effectively

Every habit, good or bad, runs on the same loop, the one you also use to create new habits that make you more productive. Charles Duhigg lays it out in his book The Power of Habit, and it comes down to this:

You have a cue, which triggers you to perform the behavior.

Then there is the behavior itself, which is what you want to do on a regular basis.

Finally, there’s the reward, which implants the desire to perform the behavior in your brain.

Over time, the reward will create a ‘craving’, which will make you want to perform the behavior. One good example is smoking. Nicotine is physically addictive in its own right, and the ritual around each cigarette, the break, the coffee, the company, makes the habit stronger still.

This craving stays, even if you stop providing a reward at the end.

This post looks at the other side: how to get rid of old, bad habits. (For a different method, see our review of Tiny Habits and the Fogg Behavior Model.)

A Song of Booze and Fire: Breaking Free from Destructive Habits

Unfortunately, habits have a downside. There are bad ones, and they can have nasty consequences. Some people get into the habit of drinking alcohol regularly. Others start smoking. Both of these habits are detrimental to your health. Drinking and smoking, over time, cause damage to your body and can lead to serious disease, such as liver damage, lung cancer, and psychological problems.

Just like with any habit, habitual smoking and drinking consists of a cue, a behavior, and a reward.

The cue can be just about anything. Maybe it’s when you feel a bit down, or every time you enter a bar, or just some time of day that tells your brain it’s ‘time to light up a smoke’ or ‘time to have a drink’.

The behavior is the smoking and drinking itself.

The reward is the high you feel from smoking a cigarette, or the blissful intoxication that being drunk makes you feel.

Over time, both smoking and drinking induce a craving, where merely the anticipation of the actual reward causes the ‘neurological reward’.

Once that happens, you’ve got yourself a bad habit.

Now, the main question is: can you ‘delete’ bad habits from your brain, so there remains no trace of them in your basal ganglia?

Unfortunately, no, not in the sense of erasing it.

How Alcoholics Stop Being Alcoholics

Alcoholics Anonymous, and many people in recovery, treat alcoholism as something you manage for life rather than cure: the old habit is still there, and one drink can bring it back.

That is the point: you can’t delete a habit from your brain. If drinking is a problem for you, talk to your doctor, or see the NHS alcohol support page (in the US, SAMHSA’s National Helpline is free and confidential: 1-800-662-4357).

But there are ways to work around this. Alcoholics Anonymous has helped a great many people stop drinking, so the question is: how do they do it?

It’s simple: they talk about it.

In AA meetings, there are no special treatments or pills. All they do is talk. And for many people, it works.

You see, it’s what they talk about that is important. In AA, people discuss why they started drinking, what makes them drink, and how drinking makes them feel. Notice anything here?

In essence, they gain insight into the cues, the behaviors and the rewards of their habitual drinking. AA also serves as a social replacement to ‘hanging out with your buddies in the local bar’. Instead of going to a place where everybody is supposed to drink, they go to a place where it’s the opposite: nobody is supposed to drink there.

So when it’s Friday or Saturday evening (the cue), instead of going to the bar (the behavior) for social contact (the reward), they replace the bar with an AA meeting.

The cue and rewards are kept, it’s only the behavior that changes.

That is why:

You Can’t Extinguish a Bad Habit. You Can Only Change It.

By keeping the same cue and reward, but substituting the behavior, you can trick your brain into getting rid of a bad habit, without actually ‘removing’ it. Duhigg calls this the golden rule of habit change.

So, to summarize:

• USE THE SAME CUE
• USE THE SAME REWARD
• CHANGE THE ROUTINE

Bad Habits in the Digital Age

These days, smoking and drinking aren’t necessarily the most common bad habits anymore. The negative consequences of tobacco use are known far and wide, and cigarettes have lost the aura of ‘cool’ that they have enjoyed in past decades. Finding pictures of musicians and movie stars with a smoke in their hand is actually hard to do these days. And every year, the number of people that smoke cigarettes drops.

Fair enough, alcohol use is still a common thing, but then again, more and more people are becoming more conscious of their health in general.

But there are new addictions that arrived with the internet. These days, people are more likely to be addicted to checking their smartphone, hanging out on Facebook, Instagram, or venting their paragraph-long opinions on X.

Instead of gorging on fast food, we gorge on YouTube videos, checking out one after the other, clicking through to find new music clips, movie trailers, video blogs and playthroughs of video games.

We don’t have to go all the way to the store to buy a new video game anymore. Just open Steam, click a few times, and you’re good to go.

We also have access to a nearly unlimited amount of TV shows on Netflix, and a more or less unlimited amount of music through Spotify. It used to be that you had to wait a day or a week for a new episode of your favorite show. Today, you can just watch the entire season in one go. After that, you can do the same with hundreds of other shows.

Digital Addiction and Its Impact: Breaking Free from Screen-Driven Habits

Desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone. Wherever you are, at any time of day, you’re able to expose yourself to the whole range of digital habits, high rewards included.

But above all, there’s the number one offender: internet pornography. Never before has so much of it, extreme content included, been a click away.

For many people it is the hardest screen habit to break. People who feel their porn use is out of control often describe problems like these:

• Depression
• Erectile dysfunction
• Poor real-life relationships
• Reduced self-esteem

If any of these sound familiar, a doctor or therapist can help. Porn even has its own version of Alcoholics Anonymous, an online community called NoFap, and it is not a small subculture: the NoFap community on Reddit has hundreds of thousands of members, and many report that their quality of life improved once they stopped watching porn. FocusMe can block porn sites while you build the new habit.

All of these habits can eat into your productivity and the rest of your life. All of them offer a constant stream of novelty and reward, and keep you hooked to the screen.

Simply put: for many of us the habit is no longer smoking or drinking. It is information.

And just like with tobacco, this comes with physical health consequences. When you sit on your couch or behind your desk all day, you hardly move, and the NHS warns that sitting or lying down for long periods is bad for your health.

How to Implement All of This in Daily Life

Most of the time, our bad habits are little things. Nonetheless, they can have a major impact on our life. They can wreck our productivity and stop us from realizing our true potential.

I can’t list ALL possible bad habits, but I can show you a few common ones and some ideas on how to turn them into something positive.

Snacking on junk food: If you’re feeling bored or down, it’s common to get some snacks out of the cupboard and stuff yourself. Once you’ve made snacking a habit, it can be hard to quit. One simple solution is just to keep eating snacks, but replace the M&M’s with a piece of fruit, a handful of olives or chocolate with 80% cocoa (which has far less sugar).

Spending the entire evening behind your computer: We get it. It’s fun watching cat videos on YouTube, checking out your favorite streamer on Twitch, or playing video games. You need something to fill your evenings with. Nevertheless, sitting behind a screen at night isn’t very healthy and can seriously mess with your sleep. So, do this. First, set up a FocusMe Weekly Schedule that blocks your evening time sinks, such as YouTube, Twitch or your games, after a set hour. Then find another routine. Read a book, do some creative work or spend time with your friends and family. If you’re unsure where to start, learn from the daily routines that actually work for high achievers. Lots of options to create habits that are infinitely more fulfilling than staring at a screen.

Watching Netflix as a study break: Imagine, you’re studying for your exams. You’ve just studied for two hours in a row. Sure, you’ve earned a quick break. Now, a lot of students will turn on their TV/laptop and binge watch their favorite TV show. A better habit would be to change your routine from watching TV to going for a walk. It’s healthier, you’ll feel better, your mind gets some real rest, and you’re not likely to extend your walk to three hours like you would when watching television.

Checking your email all the time: Email is very habit forming. It starts small. You check if anyone has sent you a message. Then you subscribe to a few newsletters. Over time, you start opening your email whenever you see the icon on your screen (that’s probably your cue), as we tend to get mails at every hour of the day. First, put a FocusMe Session Limit on your email. A Time Limit gives a daily budget; a Session Limit caps how many times you open it and how long each visit lasts, with a wait between. Once you’ve done that, replace email with something more productive. You could also make sure your email link is hard to find, so the cue is out of sight.

Drinking too much coffee/caffeinated drinks: Coffee is fine in moderation, but there’s such a thing as too much: too much caffeine can disturb your sleep and leave you jittery. If you want coffee to help your productivity, drink a few cups in the morning, but replace the others with a variety of herbal teas. My favorite is rooibos. Ginger tea is also great. Decaf coffee is disgusting, so only use that as a last resort.

Conclusion

We all have bad habits, but as you can see, it’s possible to get rid of them and even transform them into positive behaviors. The most important thing to do is to first do some quiet introspection: what triggers your bad behavior, and what is so rewarding about it? Without figuring out the cue and the reward, it will be hard for you to be able to change your bad habits.

Once you’ve figured out the components of your bad habit, figure out a new behavior to replace it. And really try to find something that has the potential to change your life in a major way.

Habits are powerful, because we are what we do.

So do the right thing.

All the best,

Jon

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

First published March 2019

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