Breaking Bad Habits

Every habit (both good and bad) lives in a system. To change the habit, you have to change the system.

Each morning when you get to work, you start browsing the internet. You’re not sure why, you just know you’re not ready to work. You waste hours every day, and you need to make it stop. But it’s a hard habit to break.

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains how all habits are formed by a cue, a routine, and a reward. In this case, the cue is sitting down at your desk, the routine is browsing the internet, and the reward is that your brain is passively stimulated. For some reason, your brain needs that passive stimulation before it can get to work in the morning.

You might be thinking, “Break the habit by removing the routine. Just don’t browse the internet.” If only it were that easy. Problem is, once you experience the cue (sitting down to your desk), you brain will start to anticipate the reward (brain being passively stimulated). If you don’t complete this routine (browsing the internet), then you’ll crave the reward. Sometimes you can ignore the craving, but often not for long.

So how do you break the habit? Duhigg argues: you need to keep the cue and the reward the same, changing only the routine. It’s almost impossible to change the cue; you’ll always need to sit down at your desk, for instance. And it’s almost impossible to change the reward; your brain needs passive stimulation before it can get to work. So the only room for change is by replacing the old routine with a new one.

In this case, when you sit down at your desk (cue), you can trying reading an industry-related book (routine) instead of browsing the internet. This gives you the same passive brain stimulation as before (reward). But since the cue is quickly met with the reward, there should be no cravings.

Not only does the technique work well for breaking bad habits, but it can also help you build good ones. Want to be more productive during the work day? Want to pay more attention to your health and fitness? Identify your daily cues and craft a routine that will give you craving-worthy rewards.

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Action items:


〉  Identify a bad habit (personal, professional, or organizational) that you’d like to change.

〉  Identify the cue, routine, and reward.

〉  Pick a new routine to replace the old one, turning the bad habit into a good one.

〉  Bonus points: map out the old and new habit systems on paper, so they’re more tangible.




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