How to Get Rid of a Bad Habit
Today is Monday, which means you’re probably thinking about what you hope to do differently this week – the habits you want to change, the temptations you want to avoid, etc. Right?
Or … have you already decided that you will try to change those habits next week? Or next month? Or the next time you make your New Year’s decision?
If you are the type of person who constantly tells yourself that tomorrow you will start all over again, now is the time to turn the script over and see what happens when you start telling yourself that tomorrow will be exactly the same as today.
As Dr. Kelly McGonigal explains in her excellent book Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More Out of It , sometimes the best way to break a habit is to “consider every choice you make. … make as a commitment to make all future choices. “
In other words: stop telling yourself that tomorrow you will change your behavior. Tell yourself that whatever you do today, you must do every day . Until the end of the week. Or by the end of the month. Or the rest of the year.
This is why it works, according to The Willpower Instinct:
The behavioral economist Howard Rachlin offers an interesting trick for overcoming the problem: always start change tomorrow. If you want to change behavior, strive to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself. He showed that smokers who are asked to smoke the same number of cigarettes each day gradually reduce the total number of cigarettes they smoke, even when they are explicitly told not to smoke less. Rakhlin claims it works because smokers lack the usual cognitive crutch that pretends to be different tomorrow. Each cigarette becomes not just another smoked today, but another smoked tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. This adds weight to each cigarette and makes it much harder to negate the health effects of a single smoke.
It works better with habits such as smoking or drinking alcohol, that is, habits that are fairly self-sufficient despite their social aspects, than with habits such as “going to bed at least eight hours before you need to wake up. “. I set myself a “six out of seven” goal for many of my habits, especially because life sometimes gets in the way; some days you really need to work late, for example, or take takeout on your way home.
Some people may also find the thought experiment “if you do X today, you should devote yourself to it all week” as a relief rather than a motivator. “If I skip the gym today, I can skip it all week! Ooh! »If this is you, it’s worth asking yourself if you really want to change your habit, or if you just feel obligated – and if there is another way to achieve your goals. (There are many ways to be physically active without going to the gym.)
However, now that you know this trick, what choice are you going to make? Since tomorrow will be about the same as today in terms of your behavior and decision-making, how do you want tomorrow to go? What are you going to do today knowing that you are likely to do the same for the rest of the week?