How To Break An Unhealthy Habit
To achieve your health and fitness goals, it's just as important to break unhealthy habits as it is to build healthy ones.
We all have bad habits. Maybe you can’t seem to stop snacking, or you spend too much time watching tv or scrolling social media.
When those habits get in the way of achieving your goals, it’s time to think about breaking them.
Unfortunately, habits aren’t easy to break. Once habits are wired into your brain, it’s very hard to stop them. That's what makes habit-building so powerful.
If you want to break an unhealthy habit, you first need to understand how habits work.
In case you missed my article about building healthy habits, read that first to understand the importance of habits, the science of habit formation, and a step-by-step guide for building new healthy habits. Here’s a brief summary:
A Habit Is Made Up Of Three Components
The cue, the routine, and the reward. These three components form a loop.
The cue is a trigger that prompts you to do the behavior and start the habit loop. The cue can be a person, a place, a thing, a time, or an emotion.
If you’re trying to build a running habit, the cue could be seeing your running shoes by the front door and putting them on.
The routine is the habit itself. This would be your run.
Finally, there is the reward, which reinforces the routine in your brain. Our brains respond best to immediate, emotional rewards. For your running habit, the reward would be a better mood, a sense of pride and achievement, and any other positive emotions you get from your run.
How To Break An Unhealthy Habit
Each of your existing habits is wired into your brain with a habit loop. That means there’s some kind of cue to do the routine and a powerful reward afterwards.
To break a bad habit, the first step is to figure out what that cue and reward are.
Let’s say you have a regular habit of going to the vending machine for an unhealthy snack every afternoon around 3pm.
What is it about 3pm that prompts you to go to the vending machine?
Maybe your energy drops because it’s been a few hours since lunch. Maybe you've been doing repetitive tasks all day and you get bored or frustrated. Make sure you have a good understanding of the cue.
Next, figure out the reward you’re getting from the behavior. In this case, you get a temporary distraction from your work and an energy boost from the snack.
Since the habit loop is hard-wired in your brain, don’t try to stop the habit altogether. That won’t work.
Instead, the key is to hack the habit loop by using a healthier routine, triggered by the same cue to get the same reward.
At 3pm (or when you notice yourself getting bored or tired) you could go for a walk around the office and eat a healthy (and tasty) snack when you get back.
That would give you the same reward (distraction and energy, plus an extra sense of accomplishment for engaging in healthy behaviors), but you’ve replaced a negative routine with a positive one.
Of course, it’s also important to have plans in place to make sure you can follow through on your routine. If you start feeling hungry but don’t have a healthy snack with you, you’ll fall back on your old unhealthy behavior.
Set yourself some goals, plan ahead, and put extra strategies in place to make sure you follow through.
If you need help turning your bad habits into healthy ones so you can start living the healthy life you deserve, contact me. Let's discuss your goals and how my coaching programs can help you achieve them!