Got bad habits? Here's how to lose 'em!

Do you have a problem with self-control?

Do you quit one bad habit, only to start up another?

Our brains adapt to patterns: patterns of impulsivity (bad) and patterns of impulse control (good). The good news is that these patterns can be changed through persistency, rather than immediate large life changes.

Part of our problem lies in our desire for quick, dramatic results. We just ate a pint of ice cream and now we’re googling “fitspiration” of people who dropped 200 pounds and changed their lives. When we think about making small changes, it doesn’t feel like enough – how will we ever get to our goal weight or a high GPA or stop drinking at a slow rate?

As it turns out, Psychology researchers have found that our self-discipline is like a muscle: if we start small and very gradually up the ante, our brain adapts and becomes stronger at fighting these impulses (Baumeister & Exline, 2000). Many articles out there have written about this – in fact, you’ve probably read one. Here, I will outline an example and lay out the steps:

Lina is an emotional eater. Everytime Lina is sad, she eats a pint of ice cream. She is now eating several pints of ice cream per week. Lina may be tempted to say “Starting tomorrow, I will stop eating ice cream. I’ll eat a banana instead”, but this is too drastic a change for an ice-cream-aholic. What Lina should do is start with a small step. Let’s say Saturdays are typically her time to unwind and destress. Since emotional eating spikes when we are stressed and unhappy (Galiebter & Aversa, 2003), avoiding ice cream on Saturday shouldn’t be as difficult as it would be avoiding ice cream Monday after work when her boss yelled at her and made her cry in the bathroom. Lina should decide “No matter what happens, I will absolutely not eat ice cream on Saturday”. She sets a day a week from now to evaluate her progress. If Lina is successful, she might add another day, say Sunday. Let’s say two weeks from now, she has successfully avoided eating ice cream on the weekends. She should feel a little proud of herself for this small, but positive change. The problem is, Lina hates her job, so tackling the weekdays is going to be tough. What should she do? If the next step feels too daunting, the trick is to not be too ambitious, but to divide the small step into even smaller steps. If Lina gets out of work at 5 and has a habit of going to the Haagen Dazs 3 blocks from her house at 6, she might then set the following goal: “I can eat ice cream any weekday I want, but I can only get it from the Haagen Dazs 3 blocks from my house”. A week goes by and she’s successful. Her next goal might be “I can eat ice cream any weekday I want, but I have to go home first. If I still want ice cream, I can walk the 3 blocks to buy it. And so on and so forth until she eventually kicks the ice cream habit.

What if she messes up? Here’s where it gets difficult. While our self-control is like a muscle, when we give in to a craving, we tend to forget about our success! Then it’s all too easy to go back to square one. If Lina was on day 5 of that week’s goal and slipped up and bought ice cream from the deli during her lunch break, she will likely feel very badly about herself. What she should do, then, is tell herself that what she is working on is difficult – she deserves credit for trying so hard. The fact that Lina feels disappointed in herself means that she is now holding herself to a higher standard – she knows better and next time, she will do better. If she keeps messing up on one step, she might go backwards to the previous, easier step for a week, and then tackle this difficult step again.

Many people also report success with visualizing their progress – the artists among us are particularly happy to create a pretty calendar. Here’s another trick many people use when trying to kick a bad habit – one that is actually counterproductive and leads to failure. When we try to reward ourselves for the things we do right – that works for some people. You know by now whether you are one of those people. If not, there’s a much-researched Social Psychology concept that explains why. When people motivate themselves with EXTERNAL rewards (“If I do this, I will buy those leather pants I know I will never wear anyway”), they’re training their brain to associate the rewards as the MOTIVATOR behind why they are working hard to accomplish a task. Then when the going gets hard, the person will say to themselves “Screw it, I’ll never wear those pants anyway” and pick up a cigarette/drink/ice cream. Instead, we should be motivating ourselves with INTERNAL rewards. Just going one Sunday without ice cream should make an ice-cream-aholic feel proud. As they move onto Saturday without a caloric dairy product in sight, they should feel even prouder. This is how the muscle gets stronger – the pride and sense of accomplishment should be your ONLY reward.

To sum up the take-away points of this article,

1. Self-control is a muscle. Small steps lead to a snowball effect of bigger steps.

2. Celebrate all of your successes, no matter how small.

3. If the next step is too difficult and you fail, remember how hard you have come and get back to it. If necessary, go back one step.

4. Do NOT reward yourself if you do well – this relies on your ability to control yourself to only do it if you pass (which is the weakness you are trying to work on!) AND it subconsciously tells our brain that we are only doing (insert good behavior here) because we want to get (insert external reward here). Pride in your accomplishments feels better than anything you can buy, eat, smoke, drink, snort, intravenously inject…you get the idea.

Baumeister, R. F., & Exline, J. J. (2000). Self-control, morality, and human strength. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 19(1), 29-42.

Geliebter, A., & Aversa, A. (2003). Emotional eating in overweight, normal weight, and underweight individuals. Eating Behaviors, 3(4), 341-347.

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