How to Put Your Bad Habits to Rest

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Every January we make a list of resolutions, in a wild attempt to change our bad
habits. Want to lose weight? Eat better, exercise more? Stop spending so much money
on QVC? We’ll often assess all the things we don’t like about ourselves and declare that
this is the year it all changes. The problem is, we make these commitments without any
idea how to actually follow through. I mean, if we really knew how to drop those fifteen
pounds and keep them off, we wouldn’t be committing to losing them every single year,
right? Changing a bad habit requires a plan, and it isn’t really about willpower. It’s about
changing your approach in a way that makes it feel like less effort. As humans, we just
want things to be easy. So why fight it? Go with it, and you could put your bad habits to
rest permanently.

The first step will be setting up a conditioning period. The basic idea is to design
a situation where you can create a new, more positive habit without sapping your
willpower completely. This is going to be the most important part of the process. Start
with a set time period for this conditioning phase. Thirty days is a good idea, because
it’s long enough to really lay the foundation for a habit change but short enough to feel
possible. Your only job for those thirty days will be making your new behavior habitual.
It could take longer for it to happen without effort. Experts say habituation takes around
sixty-six days, but focus in on your new habit regardless of results for the full thirty days,
and the rest will follow.

The next thing you’ll have to consider is that there can’t be any days off. Take
exercise as an example. You decide that you’ll take the kids out in their stroller for a
brisk, sixty-minute walk. But since you’re schedule is so busy and you don’t want to push
your willpower, you declare you’ll do this three days a week. The problem is, each day
you don’t go, the harder it will be to get out the door on the assigned day. So make it
daily. Even if it’s only a fifteen-minute walk a day, you’ll find it’s easier, and you’ll stick
to the plan for much longer. Remember, you want your new habit to become automatic,
and that won’t happen without daily repetition.

Now you’ve got to address the bad habit that you’re losing. Look, if you didn’t get
something great out of it, you wouldn’t be doing it, right? Sure you hate that you can’t
fit into last year’s outfit, but that chocolate milkshake is really, really good. Removing
the bad things from your life creates a gap, and you need to fill it with something of
your choosing or it will fill itself. So take the time to craft a list of the things you can do
to replace what you’re losing. The new foods, new exercises or experiences that will
take up the free time you now have. If you can replace 80%-90% of that bad habit with
something good, you’ll find it much easier to stick with it.

Finally, don’t underestimate the power of simply starting. It’s often the first
step that’s the hardest, so getting yourself there is most of the battle. If you can
focus your willpower on that first step, whether it’s shopping for healthier foods,
driving to the gym, or cracking that imposing book for your research project, you’ll
get it done. Commit yourself to the bare minimum if you have to, but even ten
minutes a day of your positive habit will help you replace the negative one long
term. Check out quitnailbiting.com for an interesting example of this
strategy of low level effort for big time results. But you’ll see it yourself after thirty days of
minimal commitment to replacing your bad habit.