Break Bad Habits and Replace Them With Good Ones
A daily routine built on good habits is the difference that separates the most successful amongst us from everyone else. And doesn’t that make sense?
— Darren Hardy, The Compound Effect
A father was out walking in the woods one afternoon with his daughter when he paused in front of a tiny little tree just beginning to sprout… “Pull that sapling from the ground,” the father told his daughter. The young girl shrugged her shoulders, knelt down, and easily pulled up the sprout from the soil and handed it to her father. “Daddy?” the girl said, “Why’d you ask me to do that?” Rather than answering his daughter, the father pointed to a slightly larger, more established sapling that had grown to about knee high to the girl.
“Now pull that one up,” the father instructed.
With a bit of effort, the girl yanked it up and pulled it out of the soil, roots and all.
“Now pull that one up,” said the father, pointing to a more developed evergreen that stood as tall as the girl.
The little girl looked at her father, “Daddy, this one might take awhile, can you help?”
“I’m helping you more than you know, my child,” said the father.
“Now, please pull it from the ground.”
The little girl rolled up her sleeves and got to work.
She grabbed a few strong sticks and branches lying nearby and began to pry up and loosen the roots.
Then, with every ounce of strength she could muster, she finally pulled the tree up and let it fall to the ground in front of her father.
At this point, the little girl was sweating profusely, with dirt all over her clothes.
And just as she was brushing the bits of dirt and soil off of her shirt, she heard her father’s voice…
“We’re not finished yet, my child.”
“Now, pull this one up,” said the father, as he stopped in front of a fully grown oak tree that stood so high the little girl could barely see the top.
“I can’t do that, Dad!” Said the little girl, with a mixture of disbelief and frustration.
The father looked at his daughter, gave her a calm smile, and said,
“My child, you’ve just demonstrated the powerful influence that habits can have over your life… Just like the trees in this forest—the older they get, the stronger the roots become, the harder they are to uproot. Some get so big and so strong, you might hesitate to even try.”
Habits can be hard to change.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t change them.
It simply means that some habits are tougher to change than others.
And with the right strategies, you can change the habits that are holding you back and transform them into habits that propel you forward and toward your greatest goals and ambitions.
That’s what we’ll be tackling today—how to stop bad habits and change them into good habits.
Habits are behaviors that we do with little to no thought or effort.
They happen ”automatically“ – just like how you wake up and automatically brush your teeth every morning, or when you pull out of your driveway to go to work.
You’re probably not thinking about every step that’s involved with brushing your teeth or backing your car out of the garage.
You just do it.
Because it’s a habit.
The great thing about habits is that we can choose new ones.
If we have bad habits, we can decide to break them and replace them with better ones.
We can then train and condition those better behaviors into ourselves until they become automatic and effortless—until they become habits.
This can take time and consistent effort—especially if bad habits have already taken root.
But just as you learned your bad habits over time, you can unlearn them with time and patience as well.
One way to break bad habits is to train yourself to reject instant gratification.
For example, bad habits, like eating fast food every day, are easy to acquire because the instant gratification (of a delicious double cheeseburger + fries) feels better in the moment than thinking about the long-term consequences (of being fat or getting a heart attack).
Wake up to the realities of long-term consequences and train your mind to place more emphasis on the long-term outcomes of the actions you take rather than the immediate—and temporary—rewards of instant gratification.
Here are five more ways to break bad habits…
5 strategies for breaking bad habits
- 1. Identify your triggers. What is it that precedes your bad habits? Do you engage in them more with certain people or surrounding certain events or at a certain time of day?
- 2. Clean house. Get rid of anything that enables you to continue the bad habit you’re working to break. Toss the junk food, the alcohol, or the coffee maker if necessary.
- 3. Swap it. Replace your bad habits with healthy ones.
- 4. Ease in. Small, consistent steps will get you there.
- 5. Or jump in. Some people operate differently and need an all-or-nothing approach. Know which works best for you.
6 techniques for creating good habits
- 1. Set yourself up for success. Make it work within your lifestyle. Use your calendar, write down the actions associated with whichever habit you’ve decided to work on first.
- 2. Think addition, not subtraction. Don’t focus on what you can’t do or what you can’t have. Focus instead on what you can do and what you can have—and what you will gain as a result of adopting this growth-oriented mindset.
- 3. Public display of accountability. Let the world know what you are up to and allow the people in your life to hold you accountable for it. Many of us will work harder to avoid letting other people down than we will for ourselves.
- 4. Find a success buddy. Have one dedicated person you can check in with regularly to hold you accountable and be vulnerable with.
- 5. Competition and camaraderie. Healthy competition can be a great motivator for success. And competing with like-minded people can help you develop stronger habits. Note: competition can also be destructive, so keep it friendly, and only compete with people who truly want what’s best for you.
- 6. Celebrate progress and leverage emotions. Enjoy the results along the way and acknowledge your victories. Emotions create habits: So, link strong positive emotions to creating good habits and strong negative emotions to not creating your desired habits.
- For example, when I decided to become physically fit, I associated (or “linked” up) as many positive emotions as I could think of to my goal of being in peak physical condition (I’ll feel great about myself, I’ll have more energy, I’ll look better, etc.) while simultaneously linking up as many negative emotions as I could think of at the thought of being unable to pull off my goal (I’ll lose confidence in myself, I’ll be unhealthy, I’ll look like a slob, etc.)
- This gave me something pleasurable to be pulled by (how great it’ll feel when I’m in the shape of my life) and something painful to be pushed by (how bad it’ll feel if I don’t).
Actionable insights
- Run a vice check. If you balk at the idea of giving something up in life, chances are that something is a vice and it would be better to eliminate it altogether. If you’re not sure if something is a vice for you, test yourself by giving that thing up for a predetermined period of time.
- For example, see if you can give up coffee for 30 days. If you can’t, then you’ve become overly dependent and coffee would go under your list of personal vices.
- Identify bad habits that lead you away from your goals. Then think of new small, sustainable habits you can create to replace them.
