How to break bad habits with less willpower

I decided to break twenty-two bad habits within the next months. It sounds like an impossible undertaking but let me share my strategy with you so that you can see if it works for you as well.

Before I started changing anything, I made myself familiar with habits in general. According to the Cambridge dictionary

"a habit is something that you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing that you are doing it"

We generally refer to bad habits as activities which harm us or others in some way. For example, I like to drink a cup of coffee in the afternoon. This activity harms me by not letting me fall asleep at night, starting a cursed cycle of tiredness.

As 'creatures of habit', we can be aware of the consequences of the bad habit but still continue to wallow in vice.

Why is it so difficult to break a bad habit?

Behavior consists of a trigger, followed by an action to get a reward. The trigger sends dopamine, the 'wanting' hormone to your brain, thus a lot of willpower is required to ignore the longing for reward. But by following the following strategies which cover all three areas of behavior, less willpower will be required to break a bad habit.

#1 Avoid or remove the trigger

First, you need to become aware of the trigger itself. Take your time to analyze your habits and become aware of the triggers. Ask yourself:

What makes you behave this way?
What objects or persons are involved?
When and where does it happen?
What did I do right before the bad habit?
How did I feel?

Mindfulness can be helpful with regards to this exercise. Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention to the present moment non-judgmentally. It is important for you as the observer to not judge your thoughts and feelings to start off so that you will be able to fully understand the trigger. Simply observe and be kind to yourself.

If you find it difficult to stay in the moment, start with smaller exercises. Andy Puddicombe, an expert in meditation and mindfulness, offers some training support on mindfulness on his website.

Visual triggers can be avoided by putting these out of sight, as the saying goes

"out of sight, out of mind".

Emotional triggers are based on individual, social and cultural backgrounds and need a deeper analysis as they might not be as easy to remove.

My afternoon coffee for example is triggered by my family who has the ritual to drink a cup of coffee right after we have lunch together. We tend to imitate those closest to us. I do not want to remove or avoid my family, so I need to communicate clearly to them that I do not drink coffee in the afternoon any more. In this way I remove the trigger of them arranging the coffee and the cup for me.

Even if you are not able to remove or avoid triggers at once, the realization of the existence and conscious naming of these triggers allows you to take charge of your life. As Carl Jung said:

"Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

#2 Create systems to make it harder to perform the habit

A lot of our bad habits are easy, effortless, comfortable, and accessible. Breaking them often appears to be exactly the other way around, difficult, effortful, uncomfortable, and inaccessible. The simple solution is to just turn this around. Make it hard to perform the bad habit so that it is easier to break them. Ask yourself:

How can I remove the access to them?
How can I make it uncomfortable for me?
What resistance can I incorporate in the process?
How can I make it difficult for me?
What can I do to not repeat the behavior?

As an example, I drink my coffee with oats milk, but my family prefers cow’s milk. By telling my mom to remove the oats milk from her shopping list, I will not have access to oats milk at her home. As I do not like to drink coffee black, it makes it easier for me to resist the temptation to drink coffee.

One can also swop a harmful action with a less harmful one, or even better, a good habit. For example, smokers can chew bubble gum or vape instead of smoking cigarettes. This can work for some time, however under stress people fall easily back into their old ingrained routines. When you are in these situations, the better strategy is to change the reward.

#3 Change the reward

Everything we do in life is related to feeling pleasure and to increase our general sense of well-being. Our bad habits give us an immediate feeling of happiness or satisfaction, but on the long run they harm us. By changing the reward, I do not mean to altering the feeling of happiness itself, but only how it manifests in you. Ask yourself:

What do I get out of this?
What exactly makes me feel good?
Why is it a bad habit for me and how does it harm me?
How does this affect my self-identity?
How does this fit in with the bigger picture of my life?

I always enjoyed drinking my afternoon coffee, but I started questioning this routine after reading that the half-life of caffeine in your body is around 6 hours. This means, if I drink a cup of coffee at 3pm, half of the caffeine is still in my body at 9pm. It then became clear to me, that having afternoon coffee is a bad habit for me. By just relying on willpower, I would not have been able to stop myself from having a hot cup of coffee in the afternoon. So I asked myself, what do I get out of this life ritual? First, spending time with my family fosters my social relationship with them, and secondly the coffee made me feel awake, or at least I thought it did something to reduce my tiredness. But when I evaluated that bigger picture, i.e., that actually the coffee in the afternoon ends up not allowing me to fall asleep at night, which makes me feel tired the whole day, which then triggers the coffee consumption again.

I realized that I can maintain my social connection to them by having a cup of herbal tea and not having to suffer negative consequences.

For this I could not simply swap tea with coffee, but I had to also first change the association that I had with coffee. Over the years I had the image of me being a night-owl by nature, because of my trouble with falling asleep. And thus, this coffee-drinking habit manifested itself to support this identity. In essence, we tend to demonstrate certain behaviors because they are associated with our personalities. James Clear, author of the book Atomic Habits, suggests focusing on creating a new identity if you want to set up new good habits. For example, instead of telling myself I am a night-owl and I only go to bed late, I can rather create a new self-image of me being a morning lark. This mental exercise allows me to more easily accept that skipping the afternoon coffee will really have a positive influence on my sleep patterns. I exchanged my reward of feeling immediately awake in the afternoon with the pleasure of getting up in the morning without trouble.

In summary,

breaking bad habits with less willpower is about being aware.

Keep in mind:

Understand how habits work and what positive reinforcement cycles create them
Become aware of your self-indulgences and what triggers your routines
Create systems which makes it harder to perform the habit and thus break the routine
Understand the personification of the reward

I will not say it will be easy to break my twenty-two habits, but I am quietly confident that I will be able to manage.