The power of the environment

A former banker has said farewell to the remote island he had marooned himself on in a radical attempt to stop smoking.

Change your environment to change a habit.

Removing bad habits

There are many techniques for removing bad habits once they have become established. One example is withdrawal of reinforcers identifying and removing the factors which trigger the habit and encourage its persistence. This type of observations that I keep reading lack the actual concrete and practical steps that can be applied. The best time to correct a bad habit is immediately, before it becomes established.

I don't think this is correct. A habit may be 30 years old. It takes only 30 days to replace it with a new habit. It's not yet clear to me if the habits are removed or overlaid or just their triggers renamed.

Habit is overcome by habit

Desiderius Erasmus knew that habit is overcome by habit. He lived in the 16th century:

A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.

About the same time, Thomas à Kempis was writing that getting rid of a unhealthy habit was not enough, we must replace it with a healthy habit:

We are working each day to completely remake our lives, bit by bit. We are replacing unhealthy habits with healthy ones.

The important knowledge that habit is overcome by habit has been around for 500 years and probably more. It is repeated today as well:

The way to stop a habit is by not stopping it cold turkey but by substituting a new habit. The new habit is a beneficial one and good for you. It could be good for you physically, mentally, or emotionally. It is the course of action, in an ideal world, you would like to take but are are struggling to do it.

A new habit can take up to 30 days of doing it to become established. The first six days of the new habit is hard to follow, the six days after that a little easier, going six days forward again it becomes easier still. As the habit is performed every day it does get easier and better.

If so much is known about the mechanics of forming and removing habits how come we still have bad habits? How come removing a bad habit is not as simple as learning to drive a car? And as free of prejudice?

Make it easy to break a habit

-Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of.

Why is it so easy to form a habit but so difficult to change-break-extinguish a habit?

Here's a tip. To initiate your campaign against the habit start small by setting easy goals with actions that you complete within a time frame:

Write down one very simple activity that you agree to do every day. Example: write on a piece of paper "Read this text." That's a simple commitment.

For the next few days, make sure to pick up that piece of paper, read and follow what it says.

Start adding simple activities that you'd like to do every day. One of the things that I wrote down initially was "Keep work desk clean". I used to clean my desk every 6 months or so. Always felt guilty about not doing often enough, but could never convince myself to do it - it seemed like too much work.

Then one day I read somewhere that "the state of your immediate surroundings affects your ability to focus and be productive" That same day, "Clean desk" went on my "daily ritual" piece of paper. After doing it for a while, I no longer have to think about cleaning my desk or argue with myself about whether or not I really need to dump those unnecessary papers or carry the coffee mugs to the kitchen. You've trained yourself to look at it every day - now you can be reasonably sure that you won't be forgetting to do stuff that's written on it.

If you make it easy breaking a habit is not difficult at all!

Can't change a habit by persuasion

Telling someone directly to change a habit never works. You cannot use persuasion on someone --or yourself-- to change a habit. Habit is action and action always wins against reason:

Simple information, reasoning, and appeal to fear of negative consequences are not enough to dissuade a high sensation seeker from trying some risky behavior that promises an intense reward. Once established a habit that provides reward is difficult to extinguish because of the negative emotional and physical state produced by withdrawal of the reward.

If you are to make some behavior off-limits and therefore remove the reward, then you have to replace it with another rewarding behavior.

Can you break a habit?

There is a school of thought which says that you cannot break a habit:

Well, you may think you are, but the truth of that matter is that you cannot break or change a habit. You can, however, create new, better and even stronger habits. And while you may think that the old habits are forever gone, they are simply hiding out. At some point in time, one or more will get triggered.

What do you think?

How to break a habit

Already some common recommended actions are appearing. This article is about how to break a habit.

• Breaking a habit is difficult but not impossible
• Make sure you really want to change the habit
• Keep a journal
• Choose an alternative behavior
• Start a replacement schedule right away
• Don't keep it secret
• Be patient

This is good advice. But what I want to do in this blog is to

• collect actual case studies
• formulate general rules applicable to all.

For instance, how do I decide that I really want the change a habit? First, I guess I need to be aware of the habit. How? Strong habits run on the background and make decisions for us.