How to Break a Bad Habit: 4 Actionable and Powerful Strategies

Many people will fail in life not because of lack of good intentions, but the abundance of bad habits.

This article will teach you how to break bad habits quickly and in the easiest way possible.

What is a “Bad Habit”?

A bad habit is an activity that has negative personal and/or professional consequences that come from engaging in that activity over an extended, undefined period of time. Depending on the habit; length and depth of engagement will determine the level of lifestyle consequences.

An easy example is smoking. For most people, smoking is considered a “bad habit”. It has nearly immediate consequences on one’s health (and thus, life) in the short-to-medium term. Most people would be better off quitting it.

Mindlessly surfing the web is another habit which has a variety of negative personal and professional consequences due to wasting time or even getting fired for low productivity.

Wasting a day surfing the web is unlikely to sink you, but added up – this leads to months and even years of time that could have been spent in another way and that time isn’t coming back.

How Bad Habits Stay Stuck In Your Life

Without going too deep into the neuroscience of habit formation, a habit is via a neurological process called “myelination”. This allows you to do actions faster and quicker and creates connections that are easy to fire and hard to fade over time.

This is how you can stay stuck doing something that no longer serves you.

Over time, a bad habit can become an addiction because it provides certain things for people.

Some of these may be the elevation of status (or the perception of it), the warding off of of negative emotions, or a feeling of comfort and/or safety.

Therefore, bad habits have both a psychological and neurological component and addressing both of these are the key to ending bad habits.

How to Break a Bad Habit (for Good)

Stopping a bad habit and addressing compulsive behavior (not addiction) relies on several things working well together, most of the time. You don’t need everything to go your way, but the more factors you have on your side – the better you will be.

To use an example, I’ll use myself and my previous (bad) habit of competitive video gaming.

As a disclaimer, I am not saying there is anything wrong with competitive video gaming (many competitive video gamers make lots of money), however, I was not that person. The lifestyle I was building at that time congruent with that direction, therefore it was a “bad” habit.

1. Awareness

There’s a saying that bad habits (or compulsions/addictions) thrive in the dark.

This can either be the darkness of shame but for many people it is the darkness of ignorance.

You just don’t know how bad something is until you know how bad something is.

Think about it: if you grew up in a home where smoking was “ok” and you go to larger society where most people don’t smoke, wouldn’t you be somewhat…shocked?

This can either rattle you out of your bad habit where you either attempt to quit immediately (likely) or quit immediately (rarer, but I’ve seen it happen).

But more likely, it will force you into a defensive position where you try to justify your habit or you get further entrenched into that habit, as a result of your mental paradigm being rattled.

In order to beat this, you need awareness.

Awareness requires two things:

1. Knowing what you want to accomplish in life or as a goal
2. and the realization that your habit or behavior will probably or definitely prevent you from achieving that goal

In my case, compulsive competitive video gaming was a habit that I developed throughout my teenage years as a fun way to keep myself occupied.

I took it seriously and many of my friends thought I was going to go pro.

But “life” called and it said it wanted me to go to college. In college, this habit or this hobby did not serve me.

Why?

I was inherently aware that college is a social environment and I wanted to be someone who was in that social environment (goal).

I also knew that gaming is a mostly solitary endeavor and the more time you spend in that solitary endeavor is less time socializing (realization/limitation/restriction).

I put these two pieces together and I then developed the awareness that gaming either needed to be drastically reduced or completely eliminated.

This is where I began to progress to the next stages.

2. Negative Association

If you can associate your habit with anything that will make it less attractive to engage in, that will go a long way to helping you kick it.

For myself, I quickly associated compulsive video gaming with someone who didn’t get the things in life they wanted.

There are many people who achieve a lot who play a lot of video games, but there are many people (legions, actually) out there who do not have the life they want.

Think about it.

If you are winning in a big way in real life, you would have no reason to play video games for hours on end. Life would become your video game.

As an emerging adult who began to have more demands on his time, I realized that there were just not enough hours in the day to do everything I wanted to do in life and still play a ton of games.

I quickly made the association (for better or for worse) that being a hardcore gamer = falling behind in life.

This made it easier to break that positive mental association that I had around gaming.

3. Environmental Change

Many habits you will build are contextual to the environment.

The environment you interact with regularly will determine what you do on a regular basis and what will eventually become a habit.

For myself, college was a shift that didn’t promote competitive video gaming.

Second, the dorm I was in freshman year was highly social.

Third, there was just so much stuff to do. Between getting involved on campus, studying, regular socializing and everything else — there was no time for gaming.

Even in the summers between college, I was working. Life needed to be lived.

The environment effectively closed out gaming.

4. Substitution

You need to substitute your bad habit with another habit, hopefully a good one.

When you remove a habit, you will inevitably create a black hole that needs to be filled.

In my case, gaming was replaced with working out, reading, socializing, and generally productive activities.

5. Self-Discipline

At some point, you will need to discipline yourself to start or continue with habit formation or elimination.

If a bad habit is in your life that does a lot of things for you, you will need to practice self-discipline to root it out.

Self-discipline is the act of corralling and marshaling your emotions, behavior, and mental resources to achieve a goal or intention that would not be achieved in the absence of this intention.

Meaning, if you don’t have a goal of eliminating bad habits from your life, it most likely won’t happen.

That is a key realization when it comes to this and something that will only help you as you continue.

Keystone Habits and How They Affect This Process

At this point, it’s worth talking about keystone habits because they are the foundation (literally) of what your habits rest on.

A keystone habit is a lifestyle habit that supports other similar habits in that lifestyle. Often, if you remove or break the keystone habit, all of the other habits associated with it fall away as well.

Imagine a 12 foot tall Christmas tree full of lights and decorations. Then imagine someone going to the electrical outlet and yanking out the plug and all the lights just vanish.

What happens to the lights?

They vanish.

Or imagine a bookshelf full of books and someone yanks out the bookshelf.

What happens to the books?

That’s the same effect that removing a keystone habit can have. One habit, disproportionate lifestyle impacts.

This can help you when it comes to removing a bad habit.

Why Keystone (Bad) Habits Are So Hard to Remove

Like I said earlier, habits can be hard to remove when they do a lot of psychological things for you.

Keystone bad habits are often on the borderline of addictive behavior and are surrounded by many psychological defenses.

This is to prevent the brain from rewiring itself and utilizing precious energy resources to do s.

An Anecdote of an Acquaintance

I knew someone who was a pothead and he wanted to stop being a pothead.

But it was a keystone habit for him.

He enjoyed getting high, ordering food and eating it high, socializing while high, having sex while high, etc. He used it to wake up, to wind down, to go to sleep–but it wasn’t an addiction for him. It was just the metaphorical bookshelf all his other habits rested on.

In order to remove this from his life, he built up another keystone habit. He is now a fitness junkie. He used that to replace the habit of being a pothead.

I’m not saying your transition out of your bad keystone habit will be as simple, but this to illustrate that it can be that simple given a certain set of circumstances.

Why Relapses Happen (the Undertow)

The Undertow gets much of its power from the paths etched in our brain by bad habits. One slip and we’ve left the highway, back on the old road we’ve abandoned but never torn up. – Richard O’Connor, Rewire

As we wrap up our discussion of breaking bad habits, there’s one last thing to mention. The possibility of reverting back to previous behavior.

On your way to establishing a good habit, you will backslide. Backsliding is when you find yourself gravitating back to the old bad habits you were trying to give up.

When you relapse and start the habit cycle over, the pull becomes stronger.

One thing that does not help you is feeling guilty over your relapses and backsliding.

This will only serve to reinforce whatever bad habit and addiction you have.

The only way forward is to get proactive. This means:

1. Get help if you need it – Whatever bad habit or addiction you have, do not let it linger in your life. Seek help immediately. There are a variety of places to go for depending on what is (therapist, counselor, recovery group, friends, family, etc.) but it is up to you to practice discernment and vulnerability and step forward to get help no matter how hard it may be initially.
2. Go easy on yourself – Don’t encourage indulging in bad habits, but go easy on yourself if/when they happen. Treat it as a learning experience and move on accordingly.
3. Stop making excuses – At the same time, don’t give yourself an easy out. Stop making excuses. If you can’t flex your willpower a little bit before bad habits disappear, how do you expect to handle the hard stuff in life that requires a lot of time, money, and/or emotional investment?

Conclusion + Next Steps

To wrap up, a bad habit could have been a good habit at one point in time, but it is now having more negative consequences than positive ones.

Breaking bad habits have differing levels of difficulty depending on the nature of the habit itself and its influence in your life. A habit has varying degrees of influence in your brain via a process called “myelination”.

Undoing the process of myelination requires a combination of time away and disengagement with the activity.

There are many ways to do this, but the most effective weapons will be awareness of your bad habit, creating negative associations around it, changing your environment, and ultimately substituting your behavior with another one, and being self-disciplined.

You don’t need to do all of these to succeed, but the more you do all of them in succession and combination, the greater chance that habit will be broken.

Write down your top bad habits, then select the one that is having the greatest impact in your life.

Then make a plan to disengage with them using some of the strategies in this article.

Do that continuously for for as long as it takes for all of your bad habits as long as it takes until you ultimately establish a new suite of habits.

Do you have bad habits to get rid of? What are you doing to break them? Let me know in the comments.