The Scientific Way to Easily Break Bad Habits

Mark Manson is a world-famous self-help author whose life no doubt looks very different to most of ours, and yet one of his most recent reflections really hit home:

“The older I get, the more I realize that success at most things isn’t about finding the one trick or secret nobody knows about.

It’s consistently doing the boring, mundane things everyone knows about but is too unfocused/undisciplined to do.

Get good at boring.”

How true – and how very challenging!

Indeed, it’s the small habits that lead like steps to our destination…

• How we spend our mornings.
• How we talk to ourselves.
• How we talk about others.
• What we read and what we spend our time watching.
• Who we share our time and energy with.

These choices ultimately determine the trajectory of our entire life!

If you feel inspired to break some bad habits and forge ahead with some healthier ones, here are some key insights:

A habit is formed when three things come together:

CUE > BEHAVIOUR > REWARD

To create a new, healthy habit—or even to break a bad habit—you’ll need to be as intentional as possible with all three parts.

1. IDENTIFY YOUR CUES

To break a bad habit, it’s crucial to identify your cues, and then modify the behaviour that follows. For example, if stress triggers the habit of unhealthy snacking, take a moment to acknowledge this simple fact: stress is your trigger. When you feel stressed, you’ve developed a habit to cope with it: you look for solace in comfort food.

You can’t simply ‘stop snacking’ without first becoming aware of why this habit exists in the first place, and what behaviour and reward you can replace it with.

Here’s a great excerpt from Mark Manson again:

“We spend so much time and effort on creating or eliminating the behaviour itself when instead we should be dedicating our willpower to consciously creating and/or reorganizing the cues in our environment that trigger those habits. Let’s say you want to start working out regularly. Instead of just focusing on developing the habit of “working out,” focus on developing a routine around initiating a workout.

This may seem like a subtle difference, but it’s huge.

An easy way to do this is to choose a cue that already occurs regularly in your daily life, such as getting home from work. Then, during the early stages of developing your workout habit, focus your effort on going straight to your room after you get home and changing into your workout clothes. Then go fill up your water bottle and head straight to the gym or hit the running trail or whatever.

You want to develop the habit of putting yourself in the position to work out regularly, which makes it more likely that you’ll work out regularly.

After a while, you’ll start to notice that when you get home from work (environmental cue/trigger), it takes little to no effort to go to your room, throw on your workout clothes, and head to the gym (habitual response).

You’ll even start to look forward to it, and maybe even feel like something in your life is off when you don’t work out. And that’s the power of habit.”

2. ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR CURRENT ROUTINES

These are your current set of habits. Very often, these are the actions that follow the cue. Many of us mistakenly think we’re not good at routine or habits – but newsflash: we are ALL creatures of habit!

If you think you don’t have a routine, you just don’t realize that your “routine” is not having a routine!

A routine is simply the rules you’ve created for how you live your life.

Without a set of routines that you consciously create for yourself, your life will feel chaotic and unfocused, and it might be especially difficult to move toward achieving any meaningful goals.

These routines are often hidden in plain sight – they’re not the obvious ones, like what you do every Sunday morning. They’re smaller… like why, when and how you get out of bed even when you don’t feel like it. Or, what you typically do without thinking when you are stressed or need to relax.

These are all rules for life that we unthinkingly develop over time – for good or bad. But the good news is that we can change them if we want to. How? Read on…

3. REPLACE YOUR REWARDS

Not only are we all creatures of habit, but we’re also more like bunnies than we think – following hard after that carrot on a stick!

Whether we’re aware of it or not, our habits are reinforced by the rewards they provide. The brain associates the routine with a positive outcome, and this reinforces the habit loop.

To break bad habits – we must replace the reward they offer us with something better. Using Mark’s example of working out:

You might get done working out and treat yourself to a (healthy) snack or maybe schedule a post-workout rest session by watching an episode of your favourite TV show. Whatever you do, be sure to incorporate a healthy reward into your habit routine. Under this point of rewards, keep in mind that comfort does not equal happiness—they’re completely different things.

Comfort is a shallow satisfaction that often lulls us into inaction. Happiness is a deep contentment with how everything is, including the uncomfortable parts of life.

4. CHANGE IS POSSIBLE!

While uprooting long-held habits might seem difficult and daunting, the alternative is a life spent trapped in a never-ending loop that no longer serves you. And while we’re creatures of habit, our brains are far more malleable than we tend to believe!

Thanks to the newly discovered phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, it’s been proven that habits and neural pathways can be changed through deliberate effort and repetition.

Put simply: you’re not destined to repeat the same old routines and loops – you’re hard-wired to change – if you choose to!

What bad habits do you need/want to kick to the curb moms? And what good ones are you putting in their place?