How to (Finally) Break That Bad Habit

James Clear says that looking at data can be a good start. It could be something like your Apple Watch or MyFitnessPal. There are a lot of ways to get data. It can be true for habits that you wouldn't think about. If you want to know if you spent enough time at home with your family or if you traveled too much, look at your calendar for the past year. It's hard to improve if you're so busy that you don't give yourself time to think about what you're doing There is no chance to look at the larger picture.

Creating a plan, picking your habit, and digging deeper are some of the things that can be done.

Pick one of the habits you want to break first after you review them.

"I look at a number of the challenges a patient is facing and then ask myself, 'Which one is in the driver's seat?'" I want to know if the rest of the problems will get better if I tackle one of them.

The next step is to decide how you are going to break the habit, based on your history with it and the context that leads you to do it. There are a number of examples.

It's too much money to spend.

You want to stop spending too much money if you can. When you added your credit cards to your Apple wallet, you began overspending. It was easy to buy things when you saw an ad on social media or a friend send a link to something you wanted. Wood says you want to spend money in a thoughtful and difficult way. It's counter-productive to put your credit cards on your phone wherever you go. If you want to fix this, you have to physically remove your cards from all online payment services so you have more time to think about the purchase. You can ask your friends to stop sending you products and to stop sending you marketing emails.

You have to check your phone all the time.

David Kadavy, author of Mind Management, Not Time Management suggests that if you want to check your phone less, you should lock it up. It should be difficult to actually perform the habit. It is possible to block the behavior from triggering if you go to the lockbox and unlocked your phone. Kadavy suggests that you just uninstall the social media apps from your phone. You can either block them with the parental controls or not have them on your home screen.

It's not healthy to eat unhealthily.

Clear has a bad eating habit from his life. He used to live in a house that had a Mcdonald's after the highway exit. He would stop there a lot. I looked at myself after the last one and wondered if I would ever do this again. He wondered if he would stop here and eat every single time. I decided to take a different route home. I wouldn't pass the Mcdonald's if I went left off of the exit. I didn't want to be exposed to the cue. The habit would change as a result of that.

Procrastination.

A lot of people rely on fear and anxiety in order to get things done. It can be effective at getting things done, but at the expense of stress. It can be difficult to break down tasks into smaller ones, but it is more sustainable over time. Writing these tasks down with a pen and paper can be helpful for people to keep their organizational strategies separate from the digital tools we use all day.

Wood says you have to know what the cue is, and the alternative behavior has to be both easy and rewarding. If you want to look at your phone, you can drink a glass of water instead of putting it face down. "For most people, drinking a glass of water isn't going to be as interesting as looking at their phones, so I don't know if that's going to work."

Maybe it's time to try something else if you don't succeed in breaking your habit. Wood says that multiple attempts to quit smoking is a good thing. Most people who quit have to keep trying until they find a solution that works for them.

If it takes a while to break your habit, don't be discouraged. Sometimes it's necessary to approach it a different way or dig deeper into the context that leads you to do it.