āYou can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.ā - Charles Duhigg
Bad habits are almost impossible to get rid of. If you try to stop a habit you will relapse. The viscous cycle of breaking and reforming a bad habit will continue.
You may have noticed this happen when you tried to break a habit.
You decide to stop smoking. For three days you donāt smoke, but your craving to smoke has gone up. Or for the new year you want to lose 10 lbs, but by June youāve gained two pounds.
Why?
Because you removed the habit, but you forgot to replace it.
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- Create an actionable plan
- Make the plan simple to follow
- Be consistent
I will show you a 3-step process to replace your bad habits in less than 14 days.
Hereās how step by step:
Step 1 - Find and Remove the Habitās Trigger:
Every Habit has a Trigger
Every habit has a trigger, and when the trigger is activated, the habit will begin.
Your stomach starts rumbling because you are hungry, so you get food. The trigger was your stomach rumbling (more specifically itās when you lack food), and the habit was to get something to eat.
Every morning you wake up and immediately check your phone. The trigger was having your phone next to you, and the habit was checking it. See what Iām getting at.
Eliminate the Trigger
Once you know the trigger for your bad habit, you have to get rid of it.
You have to replace it. We want to create a system that replaces your bad habits. We want to make progress consistently instead of when you feel like it. Relying on willpower is exhausting, draining, and has a high chance to fail. When you follow a system, you have set plans, simple steps, and a high chance of success.
āYou do not riseĀ toĀ theĀ level ofĀ your goals.Ā You fallĀ toĀ theĀ level ofĀ your systems.ā - James Clear
If you donāt replace habits, then you will end up relapsing (We will talk about building a new habit in the next section). The most effective way to replace a habit is to change your environment.
Change You Environment
Iām sure we have all experienced the feeling of a new environment.
We feel off, we act differently, and we may do things that we never wouldāve. But we can use this idea to effectively change our habits.
If you pick up your phone first thing in the morning, then put your phone in a different room before you go to bed. You changed your environment by removing the phone.
If you always eat a cookie when you go to the kitchen, then remove the cookies from the countertop. Put them on a hard-to-reach shelf or in a cupboard.
Change your environment to make it extremely hard for the trigger to happen.
It will become one of your most powerful tools when replacing a bad habit.
Step 2 - Building a New Habit:
Now you need to build a good habit.
Here are the 3 characteristics that make a good habit:
#1: Make the Habit Attractive
The habit needs to be something that you want to do. The more you want to do it the more you will do it.
An easy way to do this is to gain immediate feedback from your habit. If you feel like you improved, you will want to keep improving.
Try to break your habit into many different parts. For drawing it can be lines, shapes, shading, structure, style, or anatomy. Focus on improving one thing at a time. Youāll stay motivated when you see how much you are improving.
Another method is to associate your habit with a positive feeling. Do something you enjoy before the habit. This will tell your brain that this is an enjoyable habit.
#2: Make the Habit Easy
When we first start a new habit, we are usually too ambitious. We feel highly motivated at the start, but after the motivation disappears the habit goes away. And from personal experience I can tell you that losing motivation happens extremely quickly.
When I was younger my parents bought an electric piano for me to play, and I was hyped for it. For the first week I practiced daily, and in that time period I learned a few basic scales and songs. But I wanted to do better; I wanted to play something grand. Thatās when I decided I was going to learn FĆ¼r Elise.
I pulled up a YouTube video titled āFĆ¼r Elise | EASYā¦ā, and to this day I still remember sitting at my piano after two hours only having learnt the first few seconds of FĆ¼r Elise. I had barely made any progress, and after that my motivation to play piano went down until I eventually stopped playing.
This story illustrates a simple principle about habits building: Make it easy. All beginners have a vision of what theyāre going to become, and they try to start at the end. You canāt become the master without having been the beginner at some point. We all need to start small and manageable to be able to continue building the habit.
Iām not saying that you shouldnāt give up your dreams or stop trying to reach your goals, but you shouldnāt think that youāll get where you want to go quick. Start easy and work your way up.
#3: Take Small Steps
So, youāve started off with an easier version of your habit. Maybe instead of running a marathon everyday you run for a mile. Nice, thatās a great first step, but you still have a long way to go before you run a marathon (25.2 miles more to be exact).
The key to building your habits is to systematically take small steps. How do you that?
The best method is to create goals. Goals are the perfect way to track your progress, but more importantly know when youāre ready for the next step. A simple way to create a goal is to make your goal a little bit harder than your current level.
Let's go back to the running example. Maybe you want to improve your mile time to a certain pace for your marathon, but your current mile time is 30 seconds to slow. Cutting 30 seconds from your mile time requires a lot of work and is definitely not achievable in a short time span. A better way to look at it is dropping 3 seconds 10 times. Set a smaller goal to be 3 seconds faster than your current mile time. Once you can comfortably run 3 seconds faster, try to reduce your mile time by 3 seconds again. Do this again and again until you drop 30 seconds from your original mile time.
By breaking the large goal into smaller goals everything becomes much more manageable, and straightforward. You can go a step further to set a goal for each day. By getting better every day you can accomplish a lot.
1% Rule: If you get one percent better each day for one year, you'll end up thirty-seven times better. - James Clear
Step 3 - Creating a Reward
Make the Reward Satisfying
Once youāve completed everything the final step in building a habit is to create a reward for it.
The reward for your habit usually satisfies a craving that you have. When youāre stressed you bite your nails; you craved your chewing on your nails because you were stressed out. You want to create a satisfying reward for your habit.
I find the easiest way to do create a reward is by asking the obvious question: What is satisfying to me?
And your answer to that question is the reward for your new habit.
Associate the Reward with the Cue
Youāve identified your reward. Greatā¦what now? Just having a reward on its own wonāt do anything. You need to associate the reward with the habit, and more specially the cue.
Let's use the running example again. Let's say that I love Snickers bars, and Iāve identified that eating a small Snickers bar is my reward. Since I love Snickers bars so much, itās a satisfying reward. Now I need to associate it with my cue. A good cue for running is putting on my running shoes because itās an easy task with low resistance.
Now, whenever I put on my running shoes I think about the Snickers bars that Iāll be able to eat after my run. And then after my run I actually eat the Snickers bar. After repeatedly doing this a few times the act of putting on my running shoes will be associated with eating a Snickers bar.
Soon just the thought of doing the cue will trigger endorphins in the brain about the reward. Itāll become easier and easier to perform the cue because your brain wants the reward.
Best of luck on your journey to replace your habits.