Unlearning a Bad Habit Is Much Easier Than You Think
A simple 5-step process to redesign your life
95% of what we do is a habit.
What we have is a result of our habits, and so is what we don’t have.
Who we are, too, is the result of our habits.
If you want to take ownership of your life and start designing the life you want, you can’t skip the habit work. Because if you look close enough you’ll notice that so many things that you’re in the habit of doing, don’t serve you. Not only they don’t get you closer to reaching your goals and becoming the person you want to be, but they actually get you further away from it.
Here’s the good news though: unlearning bad habits is much easier than you might think.
Here is a simple 5-step process you can follow starting right now.
Audit your habits through the lenses of your purpose
- Does this serve me?
- Does this get me closer to being the person I want to be, and living the life I want to live
- Does this add to my life, or does this take away from me?
Take your journal out and ask yourself:
What would my day/week/marriage/life look like if I stopped doing that?
What could I do instead of doing that, and how would that impact my life?
Make a commitment to stop doing that
Set an intention to stop doing what no longer serves.
Take responsibility and keep yourself accountable. Let your friends or family know about your decision if you think it can help you keep your word.
Make it hard for Future You to do it
Don’t wait until the urge arises to fight your bad habit.
Instead, play your move when you’re not craving it.
Make it so that it’ll be harder for you to do what you want to stop doing, when you’ll be wanting to do it.
For example, if you commit to reducing your sugar intake you can stop buying sodas, or put cookies in the highest and least reachable spot of your pantry, where you won’t see them.
Tell your spouse that house chores are on you for an entire week if they catch you eating sweets after 5 pm.
Replace it with a new habit
Habits are brain-based. Being in the habit of doing something simply means you’ve done it long enough for it to become an automated program that now runs in your brain on autopilot.
Programs can be changed, and we can reprogram our minds to whatever we want. We only need to do something else long enough for our brain’s circuits to update.
If you want to stop eating sugars after 5 pm, you can replace that with having a nutritious healthy 4 pm snack that will leave you full of energy until dinner time and you won’t even think about cookies when you get home from work.
If you want to quit watching the news after dinner, swap that for an evening walk with your partner to talk about the day, or a longer walk with your dog to get some peace of mind. You could even start a 10k steps/day challenge with your friends, so you’d have one more good reason to get up from the couch and get moving.
Ask yourself: What’s one thing I could do instead, that would get me closer to being my best self?
Acknowledge your progress
Keep track of your progress and set milestones to celebrate yourself.
Small wins keep you going and give you something to look forward to.
Our monkey brains love that!
Here are some of the changes I made to my stack of habits, that made my life better:
- Got rid of my TV and stopped watching/reading the news altogether. I use that time slot for journaling, writing, and reading instead
- Swapped mindlessly scrolling for mindfully consuming and creating content
- Cleaned my social media feeds and replaced random, negative influences with content that builds me up and somehow adds to my life (inspiration, motivation, creativity as opposed to complaining, arguing, gossip, etc)
- Quit smoking (didn’t replace this one)
- Stopped consuming processed food and started cooking all of my meals and almost all of my snacks from scratch thanks to meal planning and prepping
What are some habits you want to unlearn and replace?
Try making a list of what you want to stop doing and what a better alternative can be. Implement the five steps above and see how it goes.
It takes 67 days on average to form a new habit (and unlearn an old one). Stick with your process long enough and you’re brain will update with the new normal soon enough.
Guaranteed by neuroscience :)
