How to stop an irritating habit
Redirect your trigger
Here’s an easy way to redirect a bad habit into a good habit.
As soon as you find yourself engaging in a bad habit, pivot immediately to a new, positive habit that you want to develop.
Don’t beat yourself up for doing it again. Don’t make yourself feel bad. Just start engaging in a new, positive habit.
When you do this, you're redirecting your trigger. Whatever triggered the old, negative habit will now be associated with the new, positive habit.
Here’s an example
Think of some bad habit that you want to stop. Biting your nails. Snacking to avoid work. Checking your phone all the time.
This habit hack is meant for reflexive habits. The kind you do without thinking but you’d like to cut out of your life.
We all have them. Some little reflex that wastes time or we use to avoid things or is just plain unattractive.
Attacking these habits consciously doesn’t work. That’s because they’re habits you’ve developed subconsciously in response to some trigger in your environment. You don’t realize you’re biting your nails…until you notice you’re biting your nails.
And trying to force yourself to stop habits like these just leads to an endless cycle of frustration.
Break the cycle
This method breaks the cycle. Don’t worry about stopping the bad habit. Just redirect it with a new one until your brain connects the trigger to the new habit.
How?
Here’s a concrete example. If you work a lot on a computer, the temptation to surf the internet can be a huge time-waster. You’re watching dumb YouTube videos and playing Worldle when you need to get stuff done.
Great. So that’s the habit you want to break. Stop wasting time on the internet when you need to focus.
But you already have the habit. If you’re faced with some task you don’t want to do, you’ve got it hardwired into your system to open a new tab and click through to YouTube. And within seconds you’ve got cat videos.
It barely takes a second, and your brain is already primed to go through the physical motions - even if it’s just a few keyboard taps - to open up a tab and start goofing off.
Even if you’re consciously trying to break this habit, you’ll still find yourself doing this throughout the day. Because that’s what a habit is. The neurons in your brain are already hardwired to fire off that response when a certain trigger happens.
What to do
When that happens, jump to a new behavior. You can’t be conscious of that habit response before it happens, so take action after you become aware of it.
Once you realize that you’ve flipped your attention to youtube, don’t beat yourself up - just start the new behavior.
What new behavior? It doesn’t matter. Pick one that fits.
You want to get more steps in every day.
When you find yourself surfing the internet, just go on a brief walk, even if it’s just around the house for a minute.
It doesn’t matter what habit you choose to substitute, just do it immediately, as soon as you realize you’re doing the bad habit.
Why does this work?
The reason this works is that the neurons that caused the bad habit are still active. Take advantage. When you follow up immediately with a new habit, your brain will start associating the trigger with the new, positive habit that you’d rather develop.
Habits are the brain’s response to an environmental trigger. When a trigger happens (you get anxious), your neurons fire off a behavior in response. By redirecting to a different behavior, your brain will now use that as the mechanism for dealing with the same trigger.
Wait there’s more
It really can be that easy. And the best thing is, it avoids all of the frustration that comes with trying to stop a habit cold-turkey through sheer willpower. Not only will that not work, but it just causes more anxiety, which is bad for your brain’s functioning and makes you less efficient.
This may or may not work with more complex habits, but it definitely helps the more reflexive negative habits that most of us want to get rid of. And you just may be surprised with how effective it is.
The point is - see what works. Earlier I mentioned a different way to change habits using something called pattern interrupts. This is a little different. It may work for you or you may want to try pattern interrupts or something different.
It's also slightly similar to an earlier post I made about replacing an old habit with a new one, but again, this is just a little different. And sometimes that little difference can make it the thing that will help you. Who knows.
Habits are complex, but that just means there are a ton of different ways to improve them. And when you want more guided direction for which way works best for you, that’s what I’m here for.
Reach out anytime and I can create a tailor-made program just for you in order to rapidly improve your habits and daily life.
Work with Anthony and hit the rocket fuel 🚀button on your success!
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