Tiny Habits, page 23
When people count calories or track points, as they do in Weight Watchers, they eat less in part because they have added an extra step that requires thinking.
Does this always work? No. But does logging calories require more mental effort than mindlessly eating? Yes. And that’s one reason it can work.
5. MAKE THE HABIT CONFLICT WITH IMPORTANT ROUTINES
The final factor in the Ability Chain is routine. This is the subtlest of the bunch, and it is one of the hardest to apply. But it’s worth considering. Look for ways to make your unwanted habit conflict with an important habit, a routine you value more than the habit you want to stop.
Surfing at daybreak became an important habit for me, and it’s part of my identity now. My new surfing routine made some of my old habits harder to do in the evening because I had to be alert and ready to face the waves early in the morning. I started eating dinner earlier. I avoided blue light from screens, and I went to bed early. These were all good changes that came from creating a morning routine that conflicted with my unhealthy evening habits.
So far, we’ve focused on changing prompt and ability to disrupt specific unwanted habits. But if you’re stuck on a habit where redesigning prompt and ability isn’t enough, there’s more you can do.
Next up in the masterplan: adjusting motivation.
Adjust Motivation in Order to Stop a Habit
Many people start with trying to influence motivation when they want to stop a habit. In most cases, this is a mistake. Why? Because adjusting motivation levels for Downhill Habits can be difficult (and almost impossible for Freefall Habits).
That’s why you don’t want to mess around with motivation if you can solve the problem by focusing on prompt or ability. You try to adjust motivation only if these previous steps didn’t resolve your bad habit.
Consider this example: If you can reduce your craving to smoke, then you might be able to quit smoking entirely. Let’s say you get a nicotine patch, or convince all your friends to quit at the same time, or maybe even find success with hypnosis. Doing these things is worth the old college try and sometimes they work.
OPTION A: REDUCE MOTIVATION TO STOP A HABIT
Another example: Let’s say you drink too much in the evening because you are stressed from work. In this case, you might be able to change what happens during the day so you don’t have such a strong motivation to drink in the evening. Perhaps you can meditate before leaving work to regain emotional balance. Or perhaps you can listen to calm music on the way home from work to reduce your stress so you aren’t motivated to drink all that wine later.
Here are a range of examples that show how a behavior can reduce the motivation for a habit.
Going to bed earlier can reduce your motivation to hit the snooze button
Putting on a nicotine patch can reduce your motivation for smoking
Eating healthy food before going to a party can reduce your drive to eat bad food at the party
Getting acupuncture once a week can reduce your motivation to use painkillers
An intriguing example of reducing motivation comes from my former student Tristan Harris, who has urged people to stop using technology mindlessly. One way to do this, he says, is to change our phone screens to show only grayscale. When you don’t see vivid colors on your screen, his hypothesis goes, those Internet memes and social media posts become much less exciting and less motivating to your brain.
OPTION B: ADD A DEMOTIVATOR TO STOP A HABIT
The second approach is to add a demotivator, but I do not advocate taking this path. It might work in some cases, but I think that it often does more harm than good.
Here are some examples of behaviors that could decrease your overall level of motivation by adding a demotivator.
Promise on Facebook that you will never drink again
Pledge to give $1,000 to a corrupt politician if you ever smoke again
Visualize how miserable your life would be if you continued playing video games all night
Note how these actions don’t address the root cause of your behavior. You are only adding a conflicting motivation that might get you to stop doing your habit.
Motivation versus demotivation is a battle, and this tension creates stress and leads to frequent failures, making you look bad on Facebook, leaving you $1,000 short, or vividly burning into your brain how miserable your future is likely to be.
And demotivators can push us into self-criticism. If you want to cut down on calories, putting a note on your fridge that says, STOP! YOU’RE OVERWEIGHT would certainly be demotivating, but it’s also demoralizing. We change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad, so make sure your attempts at demotivating behavior don’t morph into guilt trips.
Creating demotivators is easy. That’s probably why it’s such a popular technique. But if this was a winning plan, then very few people would have bad habits. In most situations, punishing or threatening yourself is a bad way to stop a habit because the shrapnel you’ll take is not worth the risk, especially when you have other options. We’ll talk more about this in the next chapter when we look at the ethics of helping other people to change.
Scaling Back the Change
If the approaches we’ve discussed so far don’t stop your specific habit, don’t give up. You have more options. The next step in the masterplan is to scale back your ambitions, and you can do that in the following ways.
Set a shorter time period for stopping habit (stop smoking for three days instead of forever)
Do an unwanted habit for a shorter duration (watch TV for thirty minutes instead of four hours)
Do fewer instances of the unwanted habit (checking social media once a day rather than ten times)
Do the unwanted habit with less intensity (pace your drinking rather than downing shots)
Why does this scaling back work?
People are often conflicted about stopping a habit. Part of them wants to stop but another part doesn’t. By scaling back, you won’t freak out that part of yourself that wants to keep the habit. Let’s say you want to quit using Facebook but you’re scared of missing out on opportunities to connect with friends. Work with that tension by scaling back.
Tell yourself that you’re going to stop using Facebook for only three days. Your specific habit is now a variation: You might find that abstaining for a limited time is easier than trying to stop forever. And with that, you start succeeding and become open to a bigger change. During the three days of not checking Facebook, you might discover that giving it up wasn’t as difficult as you’d feared and that this change makes you feel good. Or you discover that stopping Facebook doesn’t make much of a difference in your life, so ending this habit is no longer a priority. Either way, you’re gaining skills and insight to make other changes easier.
If the above methods aren’t working, move to the next phase of the masterplan: swapping a new habit for an old one.
PHASE #3—DESIGN FOR SWAPPING A BEHAVIOR
Swapping out a bad behavior for a good behavior is a common approach, and many so-called experts will tell you to start here. But it’s not entirely true that the only way to stop a habit is to replace it. Many habits can be stopped by skillfully using the steps we’ve just walked through. But there are some habits where swapping may indeed undo whatever Gordian knot you’re working on. If you’ve explored the earlier masterplan phases first and nothing has worked—well, welcome to swapping land. You’ve arrived here systematically, which means you’re focusing on the right thing and that the time and effort you invest is much more likely to pay off.
Get specific to swap a habit
As you did in phase two, you need to get specific about the habit you want to stop and the new habit that will replace it, and it’s vital that you choose the new habit wisely. Otherwise, the swap won’t work. If you choose something new only because you think it’s “good for you,” the swap is probably going to fail. If you want to stop your habit of reading political news at work, you could try using that time to file paperwork, but that’s not likely to work. Why? Because the new habit of filing paperwork is much less motivating than reading the news and it’s harder to do physically and mentally. With both motivation and ability lower for the filing habit than the news habit, the replacement habit is doomed from the start. When swapping behaviors, you’ve got to bring your habit creation skills to bear in order to find a new habit that is easier to do and more motivating than the old one.
In this part of the masterplan, you match yourself with a new habit by using methods from chapter 2: Create a Swarm of Behaviors, then Focus Map the results to find a Golden Behavior.
Let’s say I walked through these steps for swapping out my news habit, what might success look like? For me, instead of reading news that raises my blood pressure, I could watch surfing videos. I would be motivated to do this because I love surfing and want to get more skilled. And watching videos is easier than reading. So I’ve found a new habit that will replace my old one. Success!
Here’s a quick reminder from chapter 2 about the three criteria for matching yourself with a Golden Behavior.
Impact: the behavior is effective
Motivation: you want to do the behavior
Ability: You can do the behavior
Now that you’ve matched yourself with a Golden Behavior, what’s next? Prompts.
Remapping prompts to swap a habit
Remapping the prompt means doing the new habit instead of the old one when you are prompted. Let’s say you want to stop snapping at your teenage daughter. That’s the old habit. The prompt is your irritation whenever she does something careless. The next time that happens, you replace snapping at her with a new habit of saying something sincerely positive.
The next night, she grabs a yogurt and forgets to shut the refrigerator door. You feel that familiar surge of annoyance, but this is now your prompt for a new behavior. Instead of snapping, “Shut the door, for the millionth time!” you might say, “I’m glad you’re eating a healthy snack.”
As you do this new habit, don’t forget to celebrate and feel intense Shine. This is a new habit you’re creating, so you’ve got to wire it in. After you praise her choice of a snack, you’ve got to feel that you just did something good for your daughter. Congratulate yourself for supporting her and being the kind of parent that you want to be. If she looks at you in total shock and smiles, then shuts the fridge door—that’s a win, too. (Though maybe that’s not the point!)
Troubleshooting Guideline: If you forget to do the new habit, then physically or mentally rehearse the swap multiple times and celebrate in order to connect the old prompt to the new habit.
If you can’t remap the old prompt to the new habit, your choice of a new behavior might not have been so “golden” after all. That’s okay. You won’t always nail it the first time. Maybe you have an unusually steep Downhill Habit that you’re trying to replace. Perhaps you can’t make the old habit harder to do or you can’t make it less motivating. If this is the case, a good next step is to go back and select another new habit to swap in.
If you’re still having trouble, then move on to the next step.
Adjusting both ability and motivation to swap a habit
If remapping the prompt doesn’t stop your old habit, then you arrive at this step. At this point, you can be pretty sure that your old habit is either more motivating or easier to do than the new habit—or both. Mapping the bad habit and the new habit to the Behavior Model helps you see what’s going on. The old habit is farther above the Action Line, which means the old habit is more compelling to you, and so you will keep doing it instead of the new habit.
To change that, you have four options as shown in the next graphic.
Focusing your energies on any of the boxes will help you make the swap, but if you make all four adjustments, you will be even more successful in swapping your new habit for the old one. The next graphic shows the ideal scenario.
However, not all the adjustments will work. You may not be able to reduce motivation for your old habit. That’s okay. As long as you can make the old habit harder to do and the new habit easy to do and motivating, you will probably succeed in making the habit swap.
If Nothing So Far Has Worked . . .
Don’t despair. You still have options. This process is about finding what works for you. It’s like shopping for new shoes. The first pair of shoes you try on looked good on the shelf, but when you put them on your feet, they don’t fit right. Don’t force the fit, and don’t blame yourself or give up. Find another pair of shoes to try on instead.
And here are some other options to try.
Option A: Find a better new habit to swap in and follow the steps again.
Option B: Try the swap in a limited way. See how it goes for three days, then decide what to do next.
Option C: Return to phase one of the masterplan and practice other new habits to build your skills and confidence and shift your identity. Address this persistent bad habit later.
This Process Is a Skill
There is no single technique that works for stopping all habits. But now there is a process, and you can start using my Behavior Design Masterplan immediately. And you will get better with practice. You will become more proficient at pinpointing pivotal issues and resolving problems.
You might have a bad habit of always being late. Or perhaps you have a bad habit of procrastinating. These are special cases because those bad habits are created by behaviors you are not doing. When you are dealing with habits of omission or avoidance, you need to get behaviors to happen rather than stopping them. For these types of bad habits, the skilled Habiteer will focus on phase one and loop back to create new habits until the problem is resolved.
This process is a skill. When you find what works for you, future challenges will be easier to tackle. So keep going.
With each successful result, revisit your Swarm of Behaviors diagram to find another specific habit to unwind. This is how you unravel the unwanted general habit in a steady, predictable, and reliable way.
You’ll find patterns like I did when I discovered that for me it’s often most effective to make the unwanted habit physically hard. And you’ll recognize situations that make a bad habit easier to do and you’ll learn how to avoid those.
You will also find people in your life who make bad habits easier to do. In some approaches to behavior change, those people are called enablers. They are not to be underestimated! I’ll never forget a woman I’ll call Martha—someone I met when I was doing Weight Watchers a few years ago (partly because I was training their product team and partly because I wanted to lose some weight). Martha had been doing Weight Watchers for a number of years with varied success. She’d lose a few pounds here, gain a few pounds there, but overall, she couldn’t seem to gain any traction. One day in our group meeting, someone brought up the topic of food temptations created by other people. Nearly everyone had a story about birthday cakes in the break room or a coworker who always invited you to eat half of her cookie, and Martha shared a story from her week. During football season, her family gathered every Sunday to watch the games on TV, and her sister-in-law would make cheese dip and her husband would order pizza. This was a big hurdle for Martha.
She explained how she’d eaten a big healthy meal before the game last Sunday so she wouldn’t be tempted. She was happily sitting on the couch with her son, cheering on their favorite team. The pizza arrived at halftime, and her husband grabbed a big slice. As he walked by her, he waved it under her nose, and said, “Oh, Martha, doesn’t that smell good?” Everyone laughed. Everyone but Martha, that is. She had a good sense of humor about his jokes, but this time she was mad. It wasn’t the first time he’d teased her by pressuring her to eat whatever he was having. Sometimes she caved, sometimes she didn’t. She thought that the pizza incident felt different because it embarrassed her in front of the rest of the family. She told us that her husband slept on the couch for a few days—but more important, it made her realize that he had been undermining her success with Weight Watchers by enabling her bad habits.
You can’t always redesign every single aspect of your world. You can’t redesign a movie theater so it doesn’t sell soda, and you can’t redesign a bar so it doesn’t offer cheap drinks during happy hour. And you probably can’t redesign your husband or colleagues so they stop offering you sugary snacks. (Wait. Maybe you can. But that’s another chapter.) But with the Behavior Design approach, there are multiple ways to loosen every knot. While every bad habit is unique, the approach to untangling them is the same—a concrete set of steps and techniques that are customizable to your specific situation. No guesswork needed—just a little curiosity and plenty of Shine.
The Beauty of Disruption
