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

Over the course of our personal and productive lives, we will form both “good” and “bad” habits.

This is normal and nothing to be alert or ashamed about (I’ll explain why soon).

However, as personal circumstances and situations change, we’ll want to continue doing certain things, start doing others, and completely stop some others altogether.

Making and breaking habits are arguably one of the most important things you will ever do and form the cornerstone of behavioral change.

Habit formation is a field in and of itself within productivity, however, this is going to be a quick overview of how to make yourself “do what you want to do and stop doing what you don’t”.

Why Bad Habits and Addictive Behaviors Form

A bad habit is an activity that has negative personal and/or professional consequences for 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.

For many, smoking is a bad habit because over time it increases the likelihood of developing serious health consequences the more you engage in it. It is an extremely damaging habit because it has almost immediate consequences on one’s health (and life) in the short-to-medium term. Most people would be better off quitting it.

Surfing the Internet compulsively is also another bad habit that has negative personal and professional consequences due to wasting time or even getting fired for low productivity. This is a habit that has effects in the long-term. 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.

A habit is encoded via a neurological process called “myelination”, the act of creating synaptic connections that are easy to fire and hard to fade over time. This makes it easier to engage in the habit than not to.

Over time, a habit can become an addiction because it meets certain psychological criteria that the individual has set up in their subconscious as addressing “needs”. Many times, these needs are highly individual, however, we all have basic human needs that need “pampering”, if you will. Some of these are:

• Food and drink
• Close relationships with others
• A feeling of comfort and safety
• The elevation of status

There’s more, but in general; humans want to experience more pleasure and less pain. An addiction is a psychological stand-in for something that addresses those feelings or needs and often in a quick way.

Something like cigarette smoking can become an addiction because it can medicate an underlying feeling of depression, anxiety, or other negative emotion(s). Therefore, smoking can become something where there is little need or reason for someone to stop – short of death. This is also why, despite education and knowledge, millions of people in the world smoke packs of cigarettes throughout any given period of time. So at its core, addiction is a psychological issue.

While this article doesn’t deal with addiction per say, it addresses compulsive behavior, which I view lie on the borderline between a “bad habit” and a full blown “addiction”. Addiction counseling is beyond the scope of my work, but I believe you should see a professional health expert if you want problems addressing a deep addiction.

How to Break a Bad Habit and Stop Compulsive Behavior

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 habit of competitive video gaming.

1. Awareness

I always say that any bad habit, compulsion or addiction thrives in the dark. Usually it’s the darkness of shame, but in the case of habits and compulsions, it can be the darkness of ignorance. You sometimes have no idea something is a problem until it 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?

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

This is where a meditation or mindfulness practice REALLY helps because it allows you to quiet the mind and center on important things.

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 would play for hours on end and it was one of my major hobbies. I took it seriously and many of my friends thought I was going to go pro. But “life” called and they said they wanted me to go to college. In college, this habit or this hobby did not serve me.

Why?

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that gaming is a mostly solitary endeavor and college for all intents and purposes, is not. I quickly realized that college was a social game and I would lose that social game if I continued to play the wrong (video) game. So I decided: less gaming, more socializing. That was the awareness stage. Now, it was time to start putting it to practice.

2. Negative Associations

If you have any negative associations that will make your habit less attractive to engage in, this is where it is helpful to bring them in. For a smoker, the consequence of bad breath and smelling like an ashtray is enough to at least encourage people to entertain quitting.

For myself, I quickly associated compulsive video gaming with someone who was a loser. There are many people who aren’t losers who play a lot of video games, but there are many people out there who definitely are. Think about it. Are you acing those tests? No. Why? You were too busy playing video games to study. Friday or Saturday night rolls around. What are you doing for the 3rd weekend in a row? That’s right. Playing video games. I didn’t want to be that guy. So I quickly made the association (for better or for worse) that being a hardcore gamer = loser. This made it easier to break that positive mental association that I had around gaming.

3. Environmental Change

Many habits are environment-contextual. Meaning, your environment will determine your actions over time, which leads to building or breaking a new habit. If your home is filled with junk food, that’s all you’re going to eat most of the time.

Why?

That’s what’s available.

For myself, college was a huge shift that did not promote someone being a competitive video gamer. That was one.

Second, the dorm I was in freshman year was highly social. People were coming in and out of people’s rooms constantly, meeting and mingling. Not conducive to competitive gaming.

Third, there was just so much stuff to be done. Between socializing, studying for tests, getting involved on campus, and everything else – there was no time for any of that stuff. Fast forward to sophomore year and my roommates and I were highly social and always doing things. That in of itself created no time for gaming.

This was easily the most powerful shift I experienced. Even in the summers between college, I was working all the time. There were just other things to do – life to live.

4. Substitution

In this stage, you substitute your bad habit with another habit, one that is life-affirming (good). This could be a new exercise regime, a writing habit, or even watching engaging films and educational programs. When you remove a habit, you will be leaving a lot of emotional energy behind, so you need something to fill it up.

In my case, gaming was replaced with a lot of reading, socializing, working out, and things that move you up in life. Eventually I found no more need for my consoles, so one day several years ago, I just gave them away and that was that.

Keystone Habits

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.

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. Or imagine a bookcase full of books and someone yanks out the bookshelf. That’s the same effect that removing a keystone habit can have. One habit, disproportionate lifestyle impacts.

The catch is, it’s tricky. Keystone habits in terms of bad habits are often on the borderline of addictive behavior and are surrounded by tons of psychological defenses in an attempt to prevent massive neurological distress from removing that habit.

I knew someone that smoked a ton of weed and he decided to stop smoking weed. But it was a keystone habit for him. He enjoyed getting high, ordering food and eating it high, socializing high, he used it to wake up, to go to sleep – but it wasn’t an addiction for him. It was just a shelf that his other habits rested on.

In order to remove this keystone habit from his life, he built up another keystone habit – fitness. He got obsessed with fitness and getting in the best shape possible. Now, he trains 5-6 times a week, is in amazing shape, and just stopped smoking weed because it’s no longer a habit.

Think about your keystone habits and what you can add and remove to make massive lifestyle shifts.

Understanding Relapses (and 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.

To prevent relapsing into bad behavior, consider the three following things:

• Life will always happen – Things will always happen, there never will be a perfect time or day that it will be good to “start tomorrow”. Tomorrow will be your “today”. Some people use “I’ll start tomorrow” as an excuse to indulge in counterproductive behavior.
• Go easy on yourself – Everyone slips up. Give yourself a break if you relapsed. It doesn’t undo your progress and you just get back on the horse.
• 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 other one. You don’t need to do all of these, but the more you do all of them in succession, the greater likelihood that habit will disappear.

Write down your top bad habits, then select the top three. Then make a plan to disengage with them using some of the strategies in this article. Do that continuously 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.