How to stop unwanted habits & build new routines.
It’s not easy but it can be transformative.
When you try to stop a habit, it leaves a gap in your behaviour. The way to make it stick is to replace old habits with new routines.
Stopping an existing habit isn’t easy. The sequence of neural pathways in your mind associated with the action of the habit have strengthened each & every time it has been performed.
Attempting to ‘just stop’ a habit is like skiing down a steep slope and trying to come to a instant stop. Difficult to achieve and even if you do manage it, where else can you go? You need to replace the steep slope with another route, a different set of actions.
How the mind works with habits.
Imagine your mind as a ski slope. Every thought, feeling and action is a skier traversing the slope, leaving behind a route indented in the snow. These are like your neural pathways that fire within your brain.
The more a skier follows the same line, the deeper the groove in the snow. As time goes by, more surrounding skiers get pulled towards that well defined route. When we perform habits consistently, the stronger that habit becomes.
Habits usually have a single or multiple triggers that lead to a sequence of actions. Think of this like many starting points on the ski slope leading to the same line down the mountain.
On our mind mountain, it’s always snowing. The routes that we don’t use become covered in fresh snow and more difficult to follow. It’s the idea of ‘use it or lose it'. The more engrained the habit, the longer it will take to lose. We don’t want to make it snow more, so how else can we speed up the process of stopping a habit?
Stopping an unwanted habit.
With unwanted habits, a lot of people try to just stop performing it. When we’re skiing down deep grooves at pace, stopping becomes an ordeal. If we do manage to stop, then what? We still need to get down the mountain. Stopping alone isn’t enough.
With habits this is like noticing that we’re about to perform the unwanted habit yet feeling compelled to do it anyway. It’s a helpful first step but not the complete solution.
We have two strategies to move forward with. Firstly, we can make the habit more difficult to perform. If you always scroll social media when you wake up, leave your phone in another room. You’ll still have the initial urge but your neural pathways will be interrupted by having to get out of bed. It’s like putting a diversion on your ski slope. You can still return to your original path but it’s now not a given.
Secondly, we can replace the unwanted habit with a new routine.
Replacing unwanted habits with new routines.
Decide on the alternative behaviour that you want to perform. For example, instead of scrolling on your phone you might choose to drink water & get some natural light first thing.
Then, we can start to replace the habit with the new routine. On our slope, the routine is a new route we want to take from the same starting point as the existing habit. It’s a planned detour from our engrained route. At the moment, it’s covered in fresh snow so we’ll need to put some effort in to stop ourselves sliding back into the old habit.
Each time we start to perform the existing habit, we first notice that it’s happening. Maybe we’re using a blocker to make the habit more difficult which pushes us into making a conscious decision. Take the easier habitual route that we don’t like? Or trailblaze the new routine we’ve been looking forward to?
We decide to trailblaze the new route. It’s difficult to get started but feels much more rewarding afterwards. Consistently, but maybe not 100% of the time, we continue to take the new route. It becomes deeper with every repetition whilst the old route begins to snow over.
After time, the new routine becomes more like a habit. We may still take the old habit route every now and then and that’s ok. Overall, we have created a new route on our ski slope, we have strengthened a new neural pathway in our brain.
And now, here’s a trick to help you achieve the results even faster. Each time you perform the action, it’s the same person skiing. So it’s going to take them a while to create a new route on their own.
If you mentally rehearse the new routine, it’s like having another skier who can arrive at the top of the slopes in an instant. They ski the same route but can do so much more frequently. When your physical practice skier next arrives at the top of the slope, the route is much deeper than the previous time.
Replacing existing habits with desired routines & then mentally rehearsing those new routines is a powerful technique for stopping an unwanted habit.
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