Introduction
A lot of people suffer from engaging in very bad and destructive habits. and unless you decide to do something about it, nothing can change.
Luckily, we have S.J. Scott with his book titled ‘Bad Habits No More: 25 Steps to Break ANY Bad Habit.’ In his tiny book, he provides many techniques and use cases for people who want to make positive changes in their lives by eliminating bad habits and replacing them with healthy and impactful habits.
The book has 4 main sections:
- Learning about the foundation of making habits, is a good start for building habits using techniques right off the box
- Understanding how the habit loop works to crack down bad habits and turn them into good ones
- How to create a support system that generates positive environments that help you work on habits
- Some strategies to overcome habit-building obstacles
All the parts mentioned above are summarized so that one can have actionable tips to start working on your bad habits right now!
Learning about the foundation of making habits
Before working on your bad habits, you should determine if this habit is an addiction. a sign of a habit being an addiction includes consuming a significant amount of your time to the point it might destabilize your life. Besides that, another thing to look for is the potential experience of withdrawal symptoms, such as difficulty focusing or feelings of anger.
In case you confirmed let’s say drinking as a serious addiction, you should seek a psychiatrist or some support groups because this falls outside the scope of this book.
In case it’s just a bad habit, read on, because we will explore four ways of building habits.
4 Ways of Making Habits Stick
Do one habit at a time
How many of you have started the New Year’s resolutions, trying to tackle so many habits at a time? The starting is great, but a few weeks later, perhaps you have zero habits you are working on.
So the key focus should be just working on one habit at a time, it becomes effortess after weeks of doing it? Great. Jump to the second one, and so on.
Setting up 30 days challenge
The idea is taken from Steve Pavlina, it’s about deciding to give a habit a free trial of 30 days, once the period is off You can decide to whether keep the habit or not.
Four things help you stick with the challenge:
1. Finding why you doing the habit
2. Know the things that could interfere with the habit
3. Decide how you do the habit
4. by the end of the 30 days, you get to decide whether you keep the habit or not.
Know your habits goals
Without a specific target you are working on, you won’t make it. not smoking at least for 24 days this month is better than “I would never smoke again”.
Define a metric by which you check your habit
Some habits are very simple, like drinking 4 glasses of water = Done. Some others can be defined as not exceeding the maximum usage of something. For example, if you spend any day using social media for 30 minutes or less, then you consider it as DONE. Using the internet for a few hours means you failed to complete the habit for that day.
Understanding the habit loop
Every habit you engage with can be broken down into 3 main parts:
The cue: the thing that triggers you to engage in the activity.
The reward: what’s your aim for doing the habit?
The routine: is the activity you find yourself engaging in.
The first thing to hijack a certain routine that is not something productive or healthy for you is you identify the three parts. Let’s say you get stressed, so you hop onto YouTube just to watch whatever video that makes you feel good, before you know it the stress is perhaps gone (the reward has been fulfilled), but unfortunately, you end up wasting half an hour or so.
Here we might choose to change the activity, to lower the stress, maybe we can engage in some breathing activity that calms our minds back to now. That’s what we call a replacement habit. The more we do it and try to see how our mood is feeling after it’s done, we start slowly deleting the old bad habit patterns and getting used to the new positive ones.
Another great method to refrain from engaging in the bad habit is using the conditional if, if this then that type of easy conditional statements.
Let’s assume that you have the urge to binge-watch, what is the counter strategy to curb yourself from watching continuously? A ready-made “if…then” solution. Below we can find some examples:
- If my watching time for this day is below one hour, then I can watch.
- If I have completed the most urgent and important tasks from my to-do list, then I can watch.
- If I have a day off, then it’s okay to watch 2-3 episodes max of my favourite show.
To make use of your habits, It’s good to have an app that reminds you that you should do certain things to keep yourself aware of what you are supposed to do or not to do.
Build a support system
Doing habits is one thing but having the right system in place is another thing.
When you build a habit journal you end up writing down everything that is done to reflect on your results and improve in the next months.
To increase the support system in a better way, use the social pressure
You can use the social pressure, by announcing that you are doing habits on Instagram or any support groups, which might push you into Fulfilling your commitment to the habits. In other words, the more watched the better you perform. This is known as the Hawthorne effect.
Find an accountability partner. Someone you live with or someone online, what matters is that you can rely on them when it comes to updating them weekly daily of your habits performance, that way you can stick to your habit goals.
Ignore any negative feedback that can come from friends or family, they probably don’t understand what you are doing, and that’s fine, your habit goals are important and they surely will add some value to you as a person, then let them be part of your daily routine and eventually a piece of yourself.
Strategies for overcoming challenges
There are so many ways of making yourself more likely to stick with your habits such as:
Take care of your health
While this might sound like it could be a bunch of habits you need to cultivate yourself (which is a good thing), it’s very important to have enough sleep time, good nutritious food, because any hunger or uncomfortable feelings can drive you to engage in bad and destructive habits
Use “what the hell effect” to your advantage
to remind yourself that skipping habits more than once isn’t going to do you good. You should always go back and refine your habits, not responding in such a way “Oh forget about it, I might as well just keep screwing up, because what’s the difference does it make to suck again and again? Because I don’t think I can develop it anymore” a positive response for any habit missing, is to forgive yourself and keep going.
Celebrate small wins
You won’t be happy if you aim for long streaks without mastering smaller ones, when you feel proud of your small achievements, you will be more likely to seek more positive experiences. for example, you can aim to score 7 days of doing a habit, then you aim for 10 consecutive days and so on.
