Habits are a normal part of everyday life. They can also be a source of frustration and distress if those habits are bad for us. Often, my patients come to therapy to learn how to break bad habits. Those bad habits might be procrastination, smoking, over-eating, over-spending or even unhelpful patterns of relating. Sometimes bad habits can become more serious and lead to addictions or negative cycles of behaviour.
Habits are key to our self-esteem as well. If we practice good habits, like getting enough sleep, exercising, eating healthily and relating positively with ourselves and others, we really do feel more confident in ourselves. If, instead, we are weighed down by bad habits we feel stuck and can become unhappy in our lives and down about ourselves (read more here). So, today’s blog post is all about how to break bad habits (and form some good ones instead!)
How do habits form?
Habits form through constant repetition of behaviours, leading to deep neurological wiring of those behaviours in our brain. Those neural networks in our brain form more easily when the habitual behaviour activates the reward centre of our brain (the amygdala). For example, it is easier to form the habit of binge-watching Netflix while munching down chocolate than it is to form the habit of getting up at 5am to go to the gym. One of those activities has far higher pleasure pay-off than the other (with much less effort), which makes it more satisfying to repeat and easier to slip into a habitual behaviour.
Recently, I was reflecting on my bad habit…sleep procrastination! I don’t think I’m the only one who wishes they could get to bed a bit earlier and fit in a few more hours of sleep each night. But I consistently find myself putting off going to bed! I began to analyse why this was the case. Like many of us, I work long hours and juggle the grind with some downtime with my family, cooking and watching tv or reading. But that still didn’t fully explain my bad habit! I then realised that it was the context cue that was the problem.
What maintains a bad habit?
Every habit consists of: a context cue, a behavioural repetition, and the reward (learn more here).
The context cue is all about what happens before you do the habitual behaviour. It could be a certain time of day, a trigger (like stress) or a particular environment or situation.
My context cue is checking social media, which I do right before bed! Unfortunately, social media is highly addictive, and thus time gets swallowed up as I scroll and scroll. The reward? Of course it’s the stimulation of reading the latest news, catching up on the latest updates, reading all those comments on The Female Brief Instagram and liking all those posts! Unfortunately, it also makes me a repeat offender in sleep procrastination, which impacts my health and energy levels.
How to break bad habits?
When you figure out what your trigger or cue is, this helps a lot with breaking the bad habit. Once I identified that checking my phone is my context cue, I realised that I can stop doing that right before bed, and it would help avoid my sleep procrastination problem. However, by stopping the habitual behaviour you also stop receiving the reward, whatever that may be, that usually is the ‘pay-off’ for doing the bad habit. So many psychologists advise you to introduce a substitute reward. Instead of reaching for my phone, I’ve tried substituting reaching for my journal. The reward is that I find my mood improves and I become more relaxed as I journal, which leads to better quality sleep (another reward!).
Another way to break bad habits is by increasing your mindfulness, that is awareness of the present moment. Maybe you notice that the bad habit is that straight after your Netflix show ends (the cue), you go to the fridge (the habit) for a snack (the reward) that you eat without even realising it! By increasing your awareness of what your bad habits are, you can resist the urge to engage in the automatic response, and do something different to what your amygdala wants you to do. This means you move from the pleasure centre of your brain (the amygdala) to the attentional-control-planning centre of your brain (the prefrontal cortex).
How long does it take to change a bad habit?
Well, the science says that it takes 66 days to change a bad habit, or form a new automatic behaviour. That seems like a long time but it’s a small price to pay for what could be the rest of your life bad-habit free! My advice is to visualise the person you want to be, and then reflect on what you need to change to get there. After all, breaking bad habits is just about making intentional decisions to change your behaviour, one day at a time.
