Breaking bad habits

How do people go about breaking entrenched bad habits? In our webinar on this topic, we examined the research conducted by James Clear[i] and BJ Fogg[ii] (among others) into behavioural design.

James Clear, in his book, ‘Atomic Habits’, explains that the habit-forming process can be broken into 4 parts:

1. Cue: this triggers your brain to initiate a behaviour (eg seeing some cake on the table is the cue that makes you think of eating it)
2. Craving: this motivates your behaviour (a strong desire to eat the cake)
3. Response: this is the behaviour itself (eating the cake)
4. Reward: the satisfaction of your craving (enjoying the taste of the cake and feeling a sugar rush)

According to both Clear and Fogg, we can intervene at any step of this process to break a bad habit.

1. Cue – make it invisible – find your triggers and remove them whenever possible. Hide the chocolate away in a cupboard rather than having it on the kitchen table. If the cue is a time and/or a place that you associate with a habit, instigate a new habit at that time/in that place. For example, if you want to stop watching TV after dinner every day and want to read more, keep a book by the dining table so you pick that up after dinner instead.

• Craving – make it unattractive – Judson Brewer, in his book, ‘The Craving Mind’[iii], describes how smokers trying to quit were asked to focus intently on what smoking really felt like. Many were surprised at how bad smoking tasted. One smoker reported that it “smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals. Yuck!” Focusing on whether you are actually getting the experience you crave can lower cravings. For example, notice what’s happening when you’re mindlessly scrolling on your phone. When I’m scrolling on my phone, I’m oblivious to the people around me, my shoulders are hunched, my neck is stiff and I don’t feel good while I’m doing it or afterwards.

• Response – make it difficult – Shawn Achor, in ‘The Happiness Advantage’[iv], describes how he makes it difficult for himself to continue a bad habit. For example, he took the batteries out of the remote control for the TV and then put the remote control in a drawer in the bedroom. This strategy neatly avoids the requirement for willpower, which is easily depleted. After all, Shawn could always go and find the batteries and then go to the bedroom to find the remote control, but most of the time he couldn’t be bothered. If you want to stop eating sweets but your partner wants to continue having them in the house, either ask them to hide them or get a lock box with a combination code, so that only they know the code to it. Another strategy for this is described by Nir Eyal, in his book ‘Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life’ [v] who explains the 10-minute rule, or ‘surfing the urge’. Whenever you have a craving to do something you would rather not do, whether it’s checking your phone or eating a biscuit, tell yourself you can do it in 10 minutes’ time, if you still want to. I’ve used this technique a lot and have found that, during those 10 minutes, the urge will often pass.

• Reward – make it unsatisfying – for example, if you want to curb your phone usage, look at the statistics as to how much time you have spent on your phone over the last week (eg using Screen Time on iPhone). How much of your waking life are you wasting on your phone? I’m currently wasting about a third of my life – that’s frightening! Another experience I have of looking at unsatisfying rewards concerns my diet. I have a very healthy diet and I noticed that, whenever I had a weekend away with friends or family and ate sugary foods that I don’t normally eat, I would end up feeling moody and irritable for the next few days. This awareness generally helps me avoid these foods now, as they are less attractive now that I’m fully aware of the consequences of eating them.

Try out some of these techniques and see which work for you. I’ve certainly found they’ve helped me considerably in my own life.

In my next blog, I will cover how to embed good habits in your life.

[i] Clear, James, Atomic Habits (2018) Penguin, Random House

[ii] Fogg, BJ, Tiny Habits, The Small Changes that Change Everything (2020), Virgin Books

[iii] Brewer, Judson, The Craving Mind (2017), Yale University Press

[iv] Achor, Shawn, The Happiness Advantage (2011), Virgin Books

[v] Eyal, Nir, Indistractable (2019), Bloomsbury Publishing