How To Break a Bad Habit

The process of changing a habit into a new behavior is called habit formation.

It’s very hard to break old habits and form new habits since our behavior is so ingrained into our neural pathways. As we’ve seen, Confirmation Bias is being biased towards existing beliefs.

We need to be concious of our biases as well as our need to unlearn.

Framework for reshaping habits is:

1. Identify the routine

2. Experiment with rewards

3. Isolate the cue, and

4. have a plan.

Identify the habits that you prefer weren’t a part of your life, and start implementing this framework in order to become a better you.

Remember, underlying bad habits will continue to undermine your goal of improving and hinder you from becoming the best version of yourself.

The problem with only focussing your effort on developing new and better habits is that underlying bad habits, actions, and behaviours can continue to undermine your goal of improving. For the most part, unlearning an unwanted habit, whether it be a destructive behaviour pattern or a negative way of thinking, is accomplished by replacing the pattern of behaviour with a new pattern of behaviour. After time, the old pattern has been replaced with a new pattern and therefore, ‘unlearnt’.

As we’ve identified, unlearning is ‘to put out of one’s knowledge or memory’ or ‘to undo the effect of’. Once you adopt the rule of unlearning, a new habit will replace the old and you will move from a conscious habit to a hidden habit, therefore effectively ‘forgetting’ or ‘replacing’ the old pattern with a new pattern.

Whilst unlearning is essentially replacing a previous way of behaviour with a new behaviour, there’s a bit more to it.

Firstly you need to be open to change. A paradigm shift is defined as “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.”

Secondly, you need to identify what the change needs to be. Introspection needs to occur to review what change is needing to be ‘swapped out’ for something different.

And finally, there needs to be a framework around reshaping the habit or behaviour i.e adopting a plan to replace the old with the new.

Choose a substitute for your bad habit.

Cut out as many triggers as possible. Right now, your environment makes your bad habit easier and good habits harder. Change your environment and you can change the outcome.

Join forces with somebody.

Surround yourself with people who live the way you want to live.

Visualize yourself succeeding.

You don’t need to be someone else, you just need to return to the old you. So often we think that to break bad habits, we need to become an entirely new person.

Use the word “but” to overcome negative self–talk.

“I’m fat and out of shape, but I could be in shape a few months from now.”

“I’m stupid and nobody respects me, but I’m working to develop a valuable skill.”

“I’m a failure, but everybody fails sometimes.”

Plan for failure. We all slip up every now and then.