The 3-Step Process for Breaking a Bad Habit:
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Practice Mindfulness
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Improve Your Environment
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Replace the RoutineÂ
Step 1 – Practice Mindfulness
- Think on paper.
- Use a journal to track the behavior for a few days.
- Jot down the Cue, Routine, Craving, and Reward associated with the bad habit.
Since most of our habits are contextual, the best way to identify what is triggering a bad habit is to examine your environment. After determining when, where, what, or who triggers your bad habit, find ways to remove or minimize your exposure to them.
Next, write down the Routine, which is the bad habit you want to break. The last step is to write down the Reward associated with the bad habit and the Craving it satisfies.Â
Step 2 – Improve Your Environment
Now that you have identified the Cue triggering your bad habit, determine if you can remove it from your environment. In most cases, you can’t. For example, you can’t eliminate hunger while on a diet or stress from a stressful job, but it should be your first step because if you can eliminate the trigger, you’ll never perform the habit.
The next step is to make the Routine harder to do. This involves shaping your environment, and it is highly effective. For example, if you eat junk food in the evening and get rid of all the garbage from your home, you’ll break the bad habit.
And don’t say you can’t get rid of the junk food because you don’t want to deprive your kids. Your kids don’t need that garbage any more than you do. The best thing you can do is get your kids off this type of food, which has been engineered to produce drug-like cravings. Prolonged consumption even alters our brain’s chemistry the same way narcotics do.
Calling it food is generous. It has been engineered in laboratories to override our self-control. Junk food is primarily responsible for the obesity epidemic, which didn’t begin until the introduction of hyperpalatable foods in the late 1970s.
Did you know that until then, obesity rates had always hovered around 13%? Now, they are almost triple that. People didn’t suddenly lose their willpower or self-control. What changed was their food environment, which profoundly influenced their eating behavior. That’s why I emphasize shaping your environment to promote better health. The key is to make the bad habit difficult or impossible to do. The more steps and barriers you can put between you and the bad habit, the better. Better environments produce better behavior and, consequently, a better you.
Step 3 – Replace the Routine
Now that you have identified what is triggering your bad habit, find a new routine you can perform that will scratch the same itch in a less harmful manner. For example, if you snack on junk food in your pantry when you get home from work because you are tired and hungry, you could remove the junk food from your home and decide to eat some beef jerky or a piece of fruit instead to satisfy your hunger. Place the healthier, lower-calorie alternative conspicuously in your kitchen to provide a positive cue.
Conclusion:
So there you have it—the three-step process for breaking a bad habit. It’s simple, but it isn’t easy. The good news is that the more committed you are to creating a positive environment, the easier it will be to break the bad habit. Letting a friend or spouse know about your resolution will add an additional layer of accountability that could make the difference between success and failure.
When you encounter a setback, you must not beat yourself up. Look at it as an experiment that went wrong. Examine the four elements of the behavior: Cue, Craving, Routine, and Reward. Find a way to remove the Cue, reduce your Craving, make the routine harder to perform, and give yourself a less harmful alternative routine that provides a similar Reward.
The last word of advice I will leave you with is that the first place to start when it comes to behavior change is with your environment. Better environments produce better behaviors.
If I can help you, please email me at LeanByHabit@gmail.com.
Best wishes and best health!
Jeff
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Small Changes, Fantastic Results
If you are looking for a simple, common-sense approach to weight loss that creates a strong-firm body for life, Lean by Habit is it! It contains everything you need to get in great shape. You’ll have eight free downloadable training programs to choose from based on your goals, a flexible diet, a habit tracker scorecard, and other execution-focused materials to help you succeed.
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If you are motivated to improve how you look and feel, the time to act is NOW! Don’t give your motivation a chance to wane and your excuses time to talk you out of it. When it comes to improving your life, there is no place better to start than with your habits, and there is no better program than this one to help you do it.
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This book contains:
- The Three-Step Process for Behavior Change
- The Four Elements of Execution
- Eight Programs (with downloadable training logs)
- A Habit Tracker Weight Loss Scorecard
- A Flexible Diet
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