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Two of the meanest bugbears of habit-formation are:- breaking a bad habit = too hard,
- building a good habit = even harder.
Here’s why:
- Set habits are unconscious behaviors. Every habit is a routine-repetition that doesn’t need much of our mental energy, thanks to the 3 R’s of habit formation.
- Breaking/making a habit is a conscious act. It takes willpower, reminders, purpose, bouncing back, and discomfort-tolerance.
Research suggests we perform almost 43% of our daily actions out of habit. And habits are unconscious behaviors.
Read on for the psychologist-validated 7 steps to change any of your habits.
7 Steps To Change Any Habit Using Psychology
Behavior change experts use these steps in hospitals, prisons, factories, and many businesses to help people break or build habits.
Let’s make tough easy by breaking it up into seven steps.
Step 1: Choose One Behavior You Want To Change
This step is a game-changer. Start with one habit. Only one habit, whether a mental or a physical one.
- A mental behavior change, like cutting out negative self-talk, practicing mindful awareness, or cultivating a growth mindset, or not getting too agitated at minor issues.
- A physical behavior change, like starting a daily exercise habit, improving sleep habit by maintaining a regular sleep schedule, or adopting healthier eating habits.
Write down the date of starting.
Promise yourself to keep at it until you get what you want, no matter how long it takes.
1. Choose one habit to change.
Step 2: Gather Workable Information
What is the greatest productivity secret of successful people? They keep a note of their insights, dreams, and ideas.
It might take 2 to 3 weeks of taking notes on your behavior. Jot down your actions, feelings, and thoughts relating to that particular habit.
If you are good at gathering some factual and accurate data, you are halfway through.
Say, you’re addicted to social media surfing or doom-scrolling Instagram or TikTok:
- Log the times — when you started and how many minutes or hours.
- How were you feeling, and what were you doing, just before?
- What was the dominant theme of your indulgence?
- What thoughts you had after putting down your phone.
Note down each detail honestly. No one’s watching or judging you — so don’t fudge the data or leave out unflattering details.
2. Log raw data, without falsifying or minimizing.
Step 3: Identify The Trigger-Points Hidden In Your Past
Trigger-points (also called cues) are situations that either:
- set off undesired activities, or
- stop you from continuing your desired activity.
- Say you worked for four hours on an article and then went into doom-scrolling short social videos. Then your trigger-point could be boredom and lack of excitement.
- If you can’t eat your dinner without Netflix on, then your trigger-point could be a subconscious link between mealtime and entertainment/distraction, or a need for stimulation during a “passive” activity like eating.
Noticing the trigger points is marking out the Pied Piper in the town who lures your mind mouse away.
Now you know what needs to change, or reduce your exposure to.
3. Recognize the cues that trigger habit performance.
Step 4: Choose Rewards That Your Heart Wants
Even if you think you don’t want rewards, your brain actually craves them for doing something.
Now, dopamine is a hormone that your brain releases when you do some pleasurable activity. It plays a big role in your brain’s reward system.
That dopamine-reward can make you seek out the good feeling by repeating the feel-good behavior. Like eating high-carb food, mindless social media scrolling, binge-watching a favorite show, or alcohol abuse.
So, what you can do is choose a good reward for changing your behavior.
Your rewards could be as unique as you:
- One of my favorite rewards is eating peri-peri flavored roasted nuts while watching a sci-fi movie.
- For you, it could be playing your favorite mobile game, catching up with an old friend, going on a weekend vacation.
- Someone I know loves to sleep in a motel (not their home) for twenty hours as a reward for finishing a project.
These rewards, big or small, must be what you really like and love.
At the brain level, rewards reinforce habit consolidation, especially during the initial days of habit change.
4. Pick some reward for acting on your habit change.
Step 5: Create Your Action Plan
This is the step we have been working on until now. All those steps that came before this one were for its birthing.
The first component of this step is to set a goal—a specific, realistic, achievable target. The clearer the goalpost, the better your chances of scoring an ace. So go and craft the best goals of your life.
[Learn how to set the most effective goals, so that you have the best chance of achieving them.]
Suppose you barely get 5 hours of sleep each night, even less on weekends. And you desperately want to improve your sleep.
An attainable target would be 6 hours each night, with half an hour early to bed and half an hour late to wake up. Such a specific goal is reasonable and doable.
But if you aim straightaway for 8 hours a night, then it will be you tossing and turning for 3 hours in your bed.
Failing to meet your goal for days at a time could make you feel discouraged and lose hope. Within a week, you might even give up the whole idea and go back to your old ways.
On the flip side, your goal should not be too easy; it needs to be a stretch goal so that it demands you work hard to achieve it.
The second decision you must make is when and how you will release the rewards. You can do this in various ways. Some people want to be rewarded in small increments across the day since they get bored if they work for too long.
Suppose you have to spend five straight hours on a project with no distractions.
You may use the Pomodoro technique to break your total span into 50-minute slabs, followed by 10-minute breaks. After each break, you dive deep into your work for 60 minutes. You may divide your time into workable chunks by using a timer.
Now, each of those 10-minute breaks could be an incentive in itself. They can also be used to treat yourself to a little meditation or a scoop of ice cream. These rewards should be enjoyable for you.
These small rewards help you stay on track throughout the day to meet your big goal. Some might choose to ignore these small rewards while focusing on the major, ultimate reward. You are the best judge of what will work for you.
You could also give yourself points for reaching each mini-milestone, and then use a set of points to collect a reward from a prefixed list of incentives.
Reading a paper book for one hour would earn you one point, which you might use to gain twenty minutes of screen time. Alternatively, you could save it, collect more, and then use ten points to watch a movie.
Tokens allow you to collect your rewards any which way you want while still granting you a sense of accomplishment for your stickiness to your ultimate goal.
5. Set a big goal. Break it into mini-goals. Reward yourself at each milestone.
Step 6: Put The Plan Into Action
This is the step to putting your plan into action and tracking your progress.
As decided earlier, you must reward yourself for your small accomplishments as you reach for your last big goal.
If you want to break a bad habit and start by lessening its frequency, then watch out and act to prevent the triggers of that unwanted habit.
For example, if watching a Netflix show around dinner time is the reason for your overeating, do not watch it in the evenings. Eliminate the triggers sparking bad habits.
Record data of changes in your focus behavior daily to track your progress. Comparing your initial data to your daily stats can help you see whether or not your plan is working.
You might discover your course of action isn’t giving you the outcomes you intended, and it’s often a problem with your rewarding process. Habits develop through instrumental learning and build on the fundamental principle that rewarded responses are repeated (Thorndike 1898).
- A typical cause of this is the lack of strong reinforcers; your chosen rewards are not good enough to propel you to put in the effort to achieve your final goal. In such cases, tweak and rework the rewards to keep your plan of habit change on track.
- There are two more common blunders people make while implementing behavior change techniques. They either give themselves rewards too frequently or reward themselves even when they did not reach their mini-targets. This is cheating, and it renders the entire system useless.
- Another mistake is that they delay giving themselves the rewards. This prevents their brains from forming a link between the behavior and the reward. As a result, the behavior does not get reinforced.
One more thing: your intentions play a role in habit formation in the early stages. The researchers say actions performed regularly tended to become habitual and persisted with little guidance from intentions (Gardner et al., 2011).
However, as habit stickiness increases, the predictive power of intentions decreases, and people with the strongest habits simply repeat their behaviors without any input from intentions.
6. Act out your plan. Start with strong intentions. Give yourself timely rewards at each mini-milestone.
Step 7: Close The Habit-Change Process Loop
Closing the habit-change loop means:
- celebrating your successes,
- reviewing your progress,
- making necessary adjustments, and
- maintaining vigilance to ensure the new habit becomes a lasting part of your lifestyle.
Simple words: Repeat the action-reward loop for as long as it takes your brain to accept it as a natural habit..
So, when your new behavior becomes sticky, and you find yourself doing it every time without craving a reward, go ahead and take away the reward.
- If the behavior continues without you desiring any reward, then you have successfully changed your habit.
- But if you still crave the rewards, then satisfy the craving by rewarding yourself for a few more days until a full reinforcement of the new habit.
7. Take away the reward to test if your behavior has become a habit.
Behavioral psychologists recognize that this shift from goal-directed behavior to habitual behavior is because of recurrent learning. It is when habitual behaviors detach from conscious motivational processes.
Our daily life is full of habits. Research from psychology shows that we perform almost 43% of our daily actions out of habit.
Why Is It Hard To Break A Habit
Habits are automatic routines. And it’s tough to break an automatic routine in our brain.
The main problem with changing a habit is to make it through the initial weeks of conscious behavior. To tackle this uncomfortable part, we need a mindset shift.
Tell yourself this:
Over time, the pain of not doing it will be much greater than the discomfort of doing it now.
The Science of Habit Change
Habit change is called behavior modification by experts. It involves:
- Noticing the habit (unconscious behavior set)
- Setting intentions (clear and achievable goals)
- Having a plan B (anticipating hurdles and pre-planning solutions)
Its roots lie in the works of Skinner (Operant Conditioning) and Pavlov (Classical Conditioning).
Final Words
Habit formation and behavior change are not difficult, but time-consuming.
Habits are actions easy for us to fall back upon. A good habit is always easier to hold on to because it doesn’t use up our brain’s energy.
The same dynamics come to fight us when we try to break bad habits.
So, habit-breaking needs time, even when we use tricks from psychology. After all, we are trying to break an established pattern, so the brain needs to be handled gently.
√ Also Read: How To Build Identity-Based Habits To Boost Your Success Routine
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