 August 4th 2008
 Personal Development
 9 comments
This post was written for Organize IT by Mike King who is the author of Learn This, a productivity blog for passionately learning career, leadership and life improvement tips. He’s written many articles about finding your passion in life, goal setting and many other ideas around learning to have a better and more positive life. You can subscribe to his RSS feed to read more of his articles.
There is a lot of value in making change in life and so learning to do things differently is worthwhile for improving your own life and the life of others around you. Habits make up a good portion of our behavior and so there are many things we do that become habitual and there is a lot of value in learning to change some of those habits and overcome the bad ones. These are my tips and methods to do that.
Tackle one at a time
The best way to begin to overcome your bad habits is to tackle one at a time. Habits are incredibly difficult to break so you need to focus on one at a time and see it through. If you look to change too many at once, you will find yourself making no lasting change on any of them as you get overwhelmed by an inability to focus. To prevent this, it’s useful to make lists of all the habits you want to change, but put that list aside and just focus on ONE. Put all your effort at it! Allow yourself enough time to not only make a dent in breaking a habit but time to prove you’ve eliminated it altogether. It obviously depends on your habit but I recommend about two months to focus on a single habit. Measure yourself against it weekly and see how you are doing even after you seem to have broken it. A habit can easily come back even after it seems you’ve gotten over it, if you do not strengthen the fact and absolutely convince yourself that it is gone.
Often stress is a trigger for a habit to surface and since stress is going to be a lot more difficult to eliminate in order to avoid a habit, that is why I recommend needing a few months. You need a decent time frame to ensure you go through normal living with its ups and downs and stress to test you and your habit. If you can do this for a couple months, especially during some stressful times, and your habit doesn’t resurface, then you will likely be over that habit forever!
Pleasure and pain
I’ve written about using pleasure and pain before in my goal setting articles and it works in a similar way with habits. You need to understand the reasoning that motivates you to break and overcome a habit. Examine all the things about your habit that give you pleasure and all the things that give you pain. Then, look at how changing your habit will change the pleasure and pain. What pleasures will it give once it’s broken and what pain will it cause if you continue to have your habit? You want to heavily outweigh any reasons to hold onto that habit and pay attention to all the things you want to have happen in overcoming it. What pain and pleasure does it cause to others and can you use those thoughts to motivate you as well?
Related to this is to use any leverage you can to overcome your habit. That can be the help of others, daily reminders, rewards and punishment systems, anything you can think of. Keep that leverage accessible and make it available at the times and locations where your habit is most likely to come back or happen. Think of the reasons why the habit is a habit in the first place. What makes it so easy that it has become habitual? How does that hold you back and what is holding you back from breaking it? These are points of leverage as well if you get rid of those things that are holding you back from breaking it! These may be physical things, mental thoughts or attitudes and even other people. Surround yourself with the leverage points that are likely going to help you break the habit instead of continue having it.
Commit change in writing
It’s easy to say that you want to change a habit. However, if you write down a commitment to change it, you are far more likely to actually make it happen. Take that one step further and put a date to it and share it with someone close who can help watch and recognize the habit. Just that initial step of committing to change it is more than most people take and is often enough to begin the process that leads to overcoming the habit. Don’t skip this as it is a crucial starting point to commit yourself and provide some self motivation to tackle your habits. Make your commitment visible to remind yourself and re-read it regularly as you are working to overcome the habit.
Be drastic
Let’s face it, some habits are really difficult to beat. They lean on the edge of addiction and take serious effort and willpower to eliminate. One of the hardest things about breaking a habit is that even if you can hold yourself back from it for a short time, it’s easy to fall back into bad habits after just a single mishap. So, you need to be ruthless and you should never allow yourself any exceptions. Reducing the frequency of a habit doesn’t really do anything dramatic as you still have the habit. The whole point of this article is to overcome and break those habits. After all, a habit you want to overcome and eliminate is just a behavior you don’t want to be doing so you haven’t accomplished anything if you are still doing that behavior. Don’t allow yourself or anyone else to fool you into just reducing a habit! Instead, be drastic and work to eliminate it completely.
Taking that drastic step to eliminate a habit needs some action, as does almost all change. Identify the influences and temptations available to you that trigger that habit and do everything you can to eliminate them. Not having the influences and temptations around you that trigger the habit is very effective in helping to overcome it. Ask for other people’s help to watch for these and bear with you as you limit things that might even effect them. Most people will gladly help you if your habit has some inconvenience towards them (smoking, for example).
Replace the habit
People are beings of habit. That makes breaking them especially difficult. We like to do things over and over and most of the time we avoid change and prefer to be comfortable in doing repetitive tasks in our lives. This is true with habits as well and is exactly why habits form with little effort and are hard to break. However, you can also use that to your advantage in overcoming specific habits since you can spend your time purposefully replacing one habit with another. You can develop a new habit with a behavior anytime a trigger for a bad habit occurs. Repeating this over and over will train your mind to have this new habit set in, one which you specifically planned for and allow to be in place of an old undesirable habit. This is a sure way to prevent the old habit from cropping back up unexpectedly because you will develop the new habit to be in its place anytime the trigger occurs.
Progress counts
Lastly, remembering that habits are very difficult to change (as is any behavior). Pay close attention to any progress you’ve made. While you don’t want to stop at simply reducing the frequency of a habit, do take note of and celebrate each time you overcome the temptation of a habit and avoid that behavior, even if you’ve not eliminated it from your lifestyle yet. Ask others to pay attention to your habits and ask for feedback to find out how they think you are doing with it. Measure and recognize any progress you’ve made knowing that you can continue to build on that and overcome the habit bit by bit. Don’t give up on it and make sure you see it through. If you don’t completely change a habit, keep working at it or else it will just start to reoccur. Don’t move on and start tackling another habit until you are confident that the previous one is completely overcome.
Reader discussion
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I am all for writing goals down. I am a bit of a nerd, so I tend to make excel spread sheets. I have a .xcl spreadsheet made up that has a few bad habits, the last day I did them, and how many days it has been. I like numbers, and seeing “42″ next to my drinking pop habit makes me happy. Knowing that one pop would drop that number to zero is an encouragement in and of itself.
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Thanks for sharing Tage. Writing down things should definitely include tracking and measuring progress. If you remind yourself often with this spreadsheet, then its working and definitely lets you see continual progress as your numbers grow… Great idea!
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Thanks for the guest post Mike. Writing anything down is highly effective. Tage, your approach sounds similar to the Seinfeld approach I’ve discussed previously. Having a chain that you don’t want to break is very powerful tool.
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One more step to create a habit is preparation. With preparation making your habit stick is easier e.g. set your alarm clock if you want to get up early. The more preparation the better. Move the alarm clock across the room so you can’t easily hit snooze. Prepare your clothes so you don’t need to think about it as you sleep walk through your morning. Go to bed early to make it easier to get up. Know your morning routine in advance so you don’t have to think about it when you’re tired.
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Good points Summy. Working out what the obstacles are to building/breaking habits is key.
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