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Ask someone for advice about how to break a bad habit and watch their eyes light up. Immediately they'll say, oh, you should try this new app. Or you should definitely read this book. Or overwhelm you with a long list of tips that worked for me.
The thing is, we already know what we should do, but there's more to changing a habit than learning more information. Maybe you want to stop procrastinating, eating junk food, or spending money. Is it just information you need? For the most part, we already know all the conventional advice.
To stop procrastinating, put to-do's on a calendar. To stop eating junk food, substitute with healthier options. To stop spending money, create a budget, and stick to it. All these tips sound logical.
They sound like they should work. And yet, the tips alone don't need a radical change. What we actually need is a system that guarantees we follow through on our goals. Step one, get over past failures for good.
When we can't seem to follow through on our goals and break old habits, a lot of us needlessly beat ourselves up. We think, well, if I just try harder, or if I stop being so lazy, then I can make a change. And when we don't follow through, we feel guilty. Why do we do this?
Guilt is a least productive emotion. It doesn't help us move forward. It just makes us feel bad. Let's drop the guilt.
It's not our fault. We're not weak or incapable of change. If we're not losing weight, not spending quality, distraction-free time with our families, or not doing anything else we want in life, it's usually because we don't understand how to design our habits correctly. So before moving on to the next section, decide that for at least the next week, you'll try to catch yourself whenever you use guilty language.
Then, instead of beating yourself up, slightly alter your negative language into something more positive and productive. Like this. Instead of, I'm so lazy. Try, I'm human.
Everyone struggles with this. Instead of, I'm going to fail, try, I'll be fine. Even if the worst case scenario happens and I do fail, I'll still be okay. Instead of, I should do X.
Try, I'd like to do X. Instead of, I'm not the kind of person who try, what if I tried to? Once you internalize this, you make changes easier on yourself and a lot more fun. Step two, recognize how habits actually work.
Every habit has three components. Number one, a queue, which is a trigger for a behavior to start, like your alarm clock going off. Number two, a routine, which is behavior itself, like getting out of bed. Number three, a reward, which is the benefit of taking that course of action, like a nice warm cup of coffee waiting for you when you get out of bed.
The reward is how our brains actually learn to want a particular behavior in the future. We put two and two together and equate the pleasure of a cup of coffee with getting out of bed. That's how people pick up bad habits like smoking, but it's also how people stick to good habits like exercising. They link a queue and routine to a reward.
For decades, people focus exclusively on changing the behavior, the routine itself. But we now know that queues and rewards are actually the most important parts of making a habit stick. If you get the queues and rewards right, the routines form by default. That's why, for example, eating more chocolate could help you exercise more.
Step three, choose your rewards to create lasting change. Yes, you heard that right. Research has shown that eating more chocolate can help you exercise more. Here's why.
Eating chocolate at the end of a workout is a simple way to ignite the reward centers in your brain and cement the good feelings that are required for a habit to take root. It sounds contradictory that eating chocolate can help you exercise more, but it's true. What habit do you want to start? What will you do to reward yourself for taking action on this?
It's important that you plan this in advance. For example, you don't want to end your workout, leave it a rush and not be able to reward yourself with a smoothie or a relaxing shower. You want to ensure that you can give yourself a reward to make sure the behavior sticks. Here are some sample rewards you might use.
Giving yourself five-minute breaks for every 20 minutes of deep work you do, allowing yourself to buy a nice pair of shoes after you hit your savings goal for a month. Watching a TV show gills free after cooking a healthy meal. The reward can be anything you choose as long as you're giving yourself something you genuinely enjoy. Step four, replace bad habits when quitting doesn't work.
It's very hard to simply stop a bad habit. That's because we're still getting whatever cue was telling us to do the bad habit in the first place and we're wired to know the bad habit will give us an immediate reward. We're much more likely to be successful if we change a bad habit into a better behavior. Here's a common example.
A lot of us tend to look for something sweet to eat right after lunch. We hit the vending machine for chocolates, cookies, or some other sweet to fix our craving because yes, sweets and desserts taste good, but a habit is much more complicated than that. Maybe getting that sweet gives us a burst of energy from the sugar so we can push through the rest of the day. Or maybe we're not ready to go back to work so getting up for a snack gives us a chance to walk around the office and chat.
It's not just a sweet that's creating our behavior. There's a whole series of reasons that's around it. Instead of just giving up the sweets, maybe we could try getting up from our desk and eating an apple instead. Or maybe if it's the energy from the sugar that we're craving, a cup of coffee will do the trick.
The important thing to note is that we're not stopping cold turkey. Instead, we're replacing a bad habit with a new, better one. Decide which replacement habit will be and commit by writing it down. Anytime your old behavioral pattern pops up, do this habit instead.
Here are some ideas to get you started. If you're drinking too much coffee, drink a decaffeinated tea instead. If you tend to overeat when you're feeling stressed, chew gum after you've eaten your regular portion of food. If you always have this news button on your alarm clock in the morning, move your alarm to the other side of the room so you have to get out of bed to his snooze.
Step 5. Get back on track when progress stops. Even the best lead plans sometimes fail. That's life.
When we're trying to form a new habit, interruptions to our new routine can break the Q routine reward cycle. But these setbacks don't have to knock us permanently off course. Often we can get back on track with some very simple fixes. What about you?
Once you start your new habit, how will you keep doing it? It's important to plan ahead for this so if your momentum temporarily stops, you don't get permanently off track. Some things you could do, set up a quarterly review to see how you're doing with Google Alerts in your calendar system. Get an accountability and support partner could be a friend or spouse.
Make a public commitment by posting to Facebook or simply telling all your friends. Create a why or why you actually want to make this change. You just listened to the post titled How to Break Bad Habits by Ramit Sadie about TeachItBeRich.com. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on.
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And head to superpower.com and use code old at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. In his video with Charles Dweig and other resources on this article that are definitely worth checking out, I couldn't narrate those for you. So for more, check out the original article which I have linked in this episode's description at oldpodcast.com. Hope you're having a great weekend.
I'm going to leave it there for today, but I'll see you in tomorrow's show where you're off to my life. Awaits.