Break Habits By Slowing Down

I classify breaking habits as a “divisive mind problem.” A part of you clearly wants to break the habit, but at the same time you keep on doing it. Why?!

In the case of breaking habits, it’s typically a rift between your conscious thoughts and your subconscious thoughts. The subconscious mind and conscious mind are what psychologists often refer to as “System 1” and “System 2,” respectively. System 2 is explicit and rational, but System 1 is automatic and habit-based. System 2 is on your side and wants to break the bad habit, but System 1 continues to follow it.

So in order to break the habit, you need to resolve the conflict between your System 1 and System 2. The way to accomplish this is to catch yourself when you’re falling into a bad habit through System 1 and force yourself into System 2 instead. In other words, you need to force conscious awareness whenever you engage in a bad habit.

To illustrate how this works, I’m going to have to introduce something that has caused me both the greatest joy and greatest suffering.

My roommate’s mom’s homemade roasted peanuts. I don’t know what Kenny’s mother does, but seriously these peanuts are the best peanuts I’ve ever had in my life. After spring break, Kenny brought bags and bags of roasted peanuts to our apartment. I was ecstatic, I thought my life could not be more perfect.

But then, things started taking a dastardly turn. Every time I came home, I grabbed a handful of peanuts. Whenever I wanted to take a break from work, I grabbed a handful of peanuts. Any time I glimpsed a peanut canister, I grabbed a handful of peanuts.

I couldn’t stop myself. It was an automatic, insuppressible reaction. I wasn’t even happy while I was eating them anymore.

I tried changing the habit by doing something else I find pleasurable, like reading an article, instead of eating peanuts whenever I wanted to take a break. But obviously reading an article and eating peanuts are practically incommensurable types of pleasure, so it didn’t work out too well.

What ended up saving me from the control of these peanuts was incredibly simple. I said, “Okay. Whenever I eat a peanut, I’ll draw a tally mark.”

You know how painfully slow that is? I used to eat ten at once, but then I had to slow down my mind to go one by one. I couldn’t ignore how many I was eating anymore either because any time I ate a peanut there would be a permanent record of it. The tally marks moved my mode of thinking from System 1 to System 2. And almost immediately I didn’t want to eat any more peanuts.

I’m not kidding. I actually did this.

After a few days of doing this, I had completely eradicated my automatic reaction and no longer had to draw the tally marks to control myself.

Habits happen quickly and automatically through System 1, but in order to change them, we have to slow them down and enter System 2. Here are some guidelines for doing so:

1. First, check whether your problem is about habit breaking or habit formation. Habit breaking is concerned with removing undesirable actions (i.e. eating too many peanuts), but habit formation is concerned with adding desirable actions (i.e. eating more fruit). Sometimes they can be tricky to distinguish. For example, wanting to wake up early could be seen as trying to remove the bad habit of sleeping in too late. But sleeping in too late is more of an inaction than an action. Although you can still try to use some of the techniques described in this post for habit-formation, it’s a trickier problem because it requires going from System 2 to System 1, rather than from System 1 to System 2.
2. Slow down until it becomes effective. For example, drawing a tally mark every time you have a can of soda probably won’t work. But drawing a tally mark every time you take a sip of soda, will be more likely to succeed. If tally marks are too quick, write a word or phrase, like “bad” or “this is bad”, to remind yourself that you don’t want to be doing this.
3. The intervention has to be in the moment. It won’t work for you to at the end of the day write how many liters of soda you drank. You have to combat your System 1 reactions as they happen.
4. Slowing down in a way that leaves a record is an added bonus. Leaving a record of your bad habits keeps you accountable, which is why I often suggest strategies that involve writing something down, although hypothetically I could have tried something like taking ten deep breaths in between each peanut as well.
5. Pair repression of bad habits with alternative habits. Although originally I didn’t succeed in replacing peanuts with articles, once I could repress the automatic reaction to peanuts, I was then able to foster a new habit of taking breaks by reading.

Take some time to try brainstorming different ways to slow down your bad habits. What ends up working will be dependent on both the habit and your own preferences.

I’d love to hear about applications of this technique to breaking different habits. Or what kinds of challenges come up while trying this. Leave a note or response!

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Thanks to Canzhi Ye for reviewing this post.