How To Break Bad Habits

For most of college and for a lot of high school, I had a terrible addiction to energy drinks and sodas. Monsters, Red Bulls, Nos’s and I knew it was unhealthy for me. In fact, at one point I remember tweeting out something about needed help quitting these things and someone replied, “Have fun with that irregular heart beat in 10 years dude,” and that stuck with me. But not enough for me to quit.

For a long time I would try and fail again and again, and it was always this ‘Just One More Time’ excuse that would come up. Maybe there was a homework assignment that I had to do late at night so I would head to the library café and pick one energy drink and settle in for a study session. Or maybe sometimes I’d just go to the convenience store with my friends and now they are six inches away and my willpower failed me. So long story short, this was one of my worst habits and it took me years to finally beat it. But eventually I did and now it has been about five years since I have had any kind of energy drink whatsoever. I rarely drink regular soda at all as well.

Today I want to talk about how to break those bad habits. Regardless of what the habit is, whether it is drinking one too many sody pops like me, or playing too many video games when you should be studying, or just compulsively biting your nails you have the ability to break those bad habits as long as you take the challenge seriously. As Aristotle said over 2,000 years ago with some admittedly weird grammar in English translation, “What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do”. But before we dive into the actual tactics and strategies here, it’s useful to ask the question, what exactly is a bad habit?

Well in Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit, he defines a habit in general as an ingrained pattern of behavior that has three stages;
1. The cue – whatever triggers the habit in your mind
2. The routine – the pattern of behavior
3. The reward – the actions that you take to get the reward
He also mentioned that once a habit becomes truly, deeply rooted and ingrained, you’ve gone through it several times, a fourth component also comes into the equation and that’s craving. When the cue is triggered in your mind there is an intense craving for that reward. It’s important to understand this. Every habit has a reward, otherwise, you wouldn’t do it.

So essentially a bad habit is really any habit that stands in opposition to your long term goals, be it living a healthy life, or maintaining good relationships, or earning straights A’s. The reason why these bad habits stick around for so long is that they are ingrained, but almost always they are habits that lead to short term rewards. Your brain is hard wired to care a lot more about the short term than your long term goals, even though logically you know that those long term goals are more important. So essentially you are going against your own self-interests. In fact, there’s a term that originates in ancient Greece for this called akraisia.

If you want to be able to beat that akraisia, if you want to be able to beat that short term focused programming deep inside your brain, you need to have a clear, well-defined and compelling reason for breaking that bad habit.

1. The Cue

In one of his private journal Bruce Lee once wrote, “I realize the DOMINATING THOUGHTS of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, physical attraction, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality; therefore I will CONCENTRATE my thoughts for 30 minutes daily upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to become, thereby creating in my mind a clear MENTAL PICTURE”. For Bruce Lee that compelling reason; that motivation, come through intense meditation and visualization. But you can also create a real physical reminder of why you are trying to break that habit as well, and that’s actually what I did.

Out of all the reasons I had for stopping my addiction to energy drinks, the main one was my face. Because for most of high school and for a lot of college I had horrible acne. My complexion was basically the dark side of the moon and it wrecked my self-confidence. It was bad enough that I would wake up pretty much every day with blood stains on my pillow case and my sheets. So I really wanted to fix this problem and I would spend hour researching online, trying to find remedies and fixes, and trying to figure out what the causes were, but eventually I realized what I had basically known all along which is that sugar, especially sugary energy drinks and soda were a huge cause of break outs.

So one day I decided to crystallize this reason in physical form. I actually went into Photoshop (and I’m not saying you should do the same, this is just my example of how I dealt with it), I took a picture of myself and I used the clone tool to create a Photoshopped version of that picture. Basically an idealized version of what I want to look like some day. I put that on my phone and every time I would get a craving to buy Monster or a Red Bull, I would look at that picture and I knew if I gave into the craving I was pushing that reality further and further into the future.

That did help immensely, but of course, it was still tough to resist those cravings. One additional thing that really helped me to stave them off was actually replacing energy drinks and sodas with something different that still gave me a very similar reward. That’s actually the second tip here.

2. The Routine
If you can find a different routine that replaces the reward with something similar then you can replace the habit with something more productive. This is actually something Charles Duhigg talks about in the Power of Habit. For me I replaced my energy drink and soda addiction in part with sparkling drinks; La Croix, Topo Chico, San Pellegrino, because I realized it wasn’t necessarily the taste of the drinks that I was addicted to, it wasn’t even necessarily the caffeine, it was just the novelty of having that cool can on the desk and having some good tasting drink while I boring homework.

So I asked myself, is there something else where I can get a similar, if not same exact benefit? And when my girlfriend actually introduced me to La Croix, which is like a lemon flavored one, I was like this doesn’t taste the same, but it's carbonated, it’s in a can, it’s got a bit of novelty to it, so it kind replaces soda in that habit. So that was really the reward.

Sometimes you have to dig in and figure out what’s the actual reward I’m getting from this habit and are their several rewards, and if so is there a primary one that I can find a way to replace with a healthier behavior.