Four Simple ways to Stop Bad Habits
1.Make It unclear
2.Make It unatractive
3.Make it Hard
4.Make it as bad prize
How to Stop Bad Habits
Now that you have identified what bad habits you are wanting to break, it’s time to move on to the actual science behind them.
It is true that not all bad habits can be broken. For example, perhaps you have a bad habit of procrastinating and making yourself vulnerable to your partner (one who also wants to change his behavior). In that case, it is likely you cannot just “quit” procrastinating because your subconscious may just think, “I’ve been told it’s bad for me, so I might as well do it now”.
What you need to do instead, is to become aware of your weak spots (preferably before they start).
This brings us to the first step in breaking any bad habit: identifying your weak spot. This step alone is probably the most difficult part of all. I wouldn’t exactly call it the hard part, but I would certainly call it the “complexity” of it.
Imagine you’ve worked on controlling your procrastinating habit for a year and it’s still not easy to stop. You have noticed that some days you seem to have the tendency to do some things a lot better than other days.
You could look at the probability of your procrastinating on those days, but the problem is that it’s very hard to be precise about the number of times you procrastinate. On those days, what we really care about is how you feel when you are procrastinating and feeling terrible about it afterwards.
By doing a good amount of “science” on this process you can very quickly make a positive shift to start becoming more aware of your weak spot. For example, a sentence like “Sometimes I procrastinate when I’m anxious or tired, so I should try to avoid those times” would be sufficient.
This method works because, when you actually define your weak spot and why you procrastinate in that particular situation, your subconscious will take on the challenge of trying to address it. If you have already made your weak spot extremely concrete by giving an explanation for why you do the bad habit in the first place, you can be sure that it won’t be difficult to reverse the process.
You can use any tool you like to identify your weak spot (this post suggests Fitter way as a good starting point) and even use a simplified version like this to go from a bad habit to a good habit:
You always see pictures of people taking steps in the morning, like “I eat all my food at the same time, I do 20 squats, I go running before work”.
Then you see pictures of people who need a little more motivation in the morning to do those same steps. There’s no difference in the two groups, except that the ones who need a little push have a stronger habit – they have a habit that they “need” to do instead of a habit that they “want to” do. Those who have a “want” will have the motivation to do it in the morning, so they will have the habits of doing their behaviors, but not always doing them as they “need” to. The ones who have a “need” are doing it out of habit.
Bonus ebook- https://up-to-down.net/237571/Canthurtme