4-Step Method By James Clear To Break Bad Habits And Build Good Ones …
The step-by-step method for replacing bad habits with good ones
Habits are a crucial part of our personal and professional lives, a set of good habits can set us apart from the pack and assist us in progressing in our careers, health, and relationships.
While a set of bad habits can completely ruin our lives.
Good habits lay the foundation of a good life. I’ve always been fascinated by habits, and the crucial role they play in our lives.
What makes the subject of habits even more interesting is the fact that we already know that repeating a certain behavior is bad for us, it is not contributing anything towards our long or short-term goals but even then we somehow feel persuaded to do it by our own monkey minds.
It seems as though our minds somehow manage to persuade us to delay or refrain from doing certain habits, no matter how useful or rewarding they are to our personal growth.
We’re all struggling with bad habits nobody is immune to them. Bad habits prevent us from reaching our goals and achieving our true potential.
“All people are the same; only their habits differ.” ― Confucius
So here in this article, I will be discussing a step-by-step method to help you break bad habits and replace them with good ones originally proposed by James Clear.
Let’s set the record straight that breaking bad habits is no piece of cake, it takes hard work, discipline, patience, and the right strategy to replace them with good ones. So do not expect overnight results, you are reprogramming your brain’s reward system so it takes time but the effort is worth it.
We cannot completely eliminate a bad habit, we can replace it with a good one that rewards us in a healthier way.
There are four laws of habit building and inversion of those laws will help us in breaking a habit, we need to understand them so that we’ll not be vulnerable to our bad habits.
Inversion of the 1st Law (Cue): Make It Invisible.
Every habit good or bad is initiated by a cue, cues trigger us to start a certain behavior. We are more likely to notice cues that stand out. In order for bad habits to disappear, we need to make the cues that lead to them “INVISIBLE.”
Now the best way to eliminate the cues is to redesign your environment. Identify the cues, that cause you to repeat bad behaviors. Reduce your exposure and remove as many cues as possible from your bad habits from your environment.
Your cues can also be a location, we repeat certain bad behavior at a specific location in our house, office, or anywhere else. We mentally assign our habits to the locations in which they occur. Our behavior is not defined by the objects in our environment but by our relationship with them.
Stop thinking about your environment as something which is filled with mere objects and start thinking of it as filled with relationships.
As soon as I lay on my bed, I almost unconsciously pick a book sitting next to my bed, I have developed this relationship with my bed, for someone else it might be different, they might feel start scrolling social media as soon as they lay on their bed. Different people share different relationships with the objects present in their environment.
For breaking bad habits and forming good ones it is important to observe these relationships they assist in removing triggers that cause bad behaviors and will also help in replacing them with triggers that build good habits.
Habits can be easier to change in a new environment.
Actionable Insight:
Find an area, corner, or nook in your environment that you rarely use and build a new routine in that area. You are free to explore other places in and around your surrounding to replace bad habits with good ones.
Inversion of the 2nd Law (Craving): Make It Unattractive.
Craving is a desire to change your internal state. Every behavior has a surface-level craving and a deep underlying craving. Different people satisfy their internal cravings in a different ways. When someone feels anxious, one might smoke a cigarette and the other might run or lift weights.
We have an underlying craving to connect with people, which is why scrolling Instagram feels so satisfying. There is a deep underlying craving that motivates us to repeat bad behaviors daily.
Sometimes all we need is a mindset shift. We can make hard habits more attractive by associating them with positive experiences and break the bad habits by associating them with negative experiences.
In the past year, I have developed a habit of working out at least 4–5 times a week and broke the bad habit of not being active with the same method. I associated good feelings with working out. Telling myself the benefits of exercising, eating nutritious food, and associating guilt and negative feeling with being a couch potato and eating junk food.
By continuously reframing my mind in this way, the desire to repeat good behavior increased gradually and the craving to repeat the bad ones went down the slope.
Actionable Insight:
Always remember how you felt after you repeat a good behavior or bad behavior, and if possible write it down.
There are high chances that you feel guilty after smoking, eating something unhealthy, getting angry at someone, or not exercising. Ask yourself Do I want to feel this way for the rest of my life? Or I want to change. Your own heart will give you the answer to that question.
Inversion of the 3rd Law (Response): Make It Difficult.
This is the actual activity that we do. You saw a cue, you’ll get a craving and you’ll perform a response. Our mind is always looking the reduce the effort, that’s why we have habits so that we do not have to learn everything from scratch every day. As difficulty increases, the probability of us repeating our bad habits decreases. If our bad habits are easy to do, we are more likely to repeat them.
So what we need to do is to increase the friction or the number of steps between us and our bad habits.
Either you can do it on your own or you can get help from a friend who is happy to help you out during this process.
Actionable Insight:
Pick one bad habit that restricts you to repeat other good behaviors. Let’s say social media is restricting you from finishing the tasks that are important for your long or short-term goals.
Read about the bad effects of social media on your brain and your productivity, and keep it at the forefront of your mind (Law 2). Delete all the social media apps from your smartphone in the morning. And every time you have the urge to reinstall them or use them on some other device remind yourself of their ill effects.
The combination of these two will help you in reducing social media usage permanently.
Inversion of the 4th Law (Reward): Make It Unsatisfying.
This is the motivation or the real reason why we actually do a certain activity good or bad in the first place. Smokers smoke because of the feeling they get after a cigarette, that feeling is their reward.
Those who lift weights do so because they enjoy the feeling after the workout, as the rush of endorphins in their bloodstream makes them feel happy. That feeling of satisfaction or happiness is the reward.
The human brain is wired to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards. What is immediately rewarded is repeated.
To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to make them as painful as they can get in the moment. One of the ways you can do that is by getting an accountability partner someone who is as motivated as you are and share similar goals. Make the cost of your bad habits public and painful.
Actionable Insight:
Find an accountability partner, and ask him/her to hold you accountable for your bad behavior. They have to be someone you know very well such as your girlfriend/boyfriend, spouse, siblings, or anyone who is close to you in some way or the other.
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