3 Science-Based Tips on How to Break Bad Habits

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Mindfully observe what you are doing right now. Is any part of it habitual?

What is a habit? Habits are learned associations between context cues and responses, such as between the desk in your room and the act of studying, or between feelings of boredom and eating ice cream.

Habits allow us to automate actions we perform frequently; for example, cooking familiar foods, driving home from work, and working out at the gym.

But undesirable or unhealthy behaviors (e.g., mouth breathing, nose picking, overeating, sedentary behavior) can also become habitual.

And, as you may know from personal experience, building good habits and breaking bad habits can be challenging.

In this article, I review effective strategies that can help.

I discuss a paper by W. Wood, published in the August 2024 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, which evaluates the latest research on effective habit formation and habit change.

Science-based interventions for habit change

Many habit-change interventions are based on the assumption that changing behavior requires modifying beliefs or goals.

For instance, the assumption that the only requirements for building exercise habits are learning the benefits of exercise and setting appropriate goals.

This approach can work, but mostly in the short term and in situations where one has both the energy and opportunity to control the behavior in question. So, it fails whenever one feels unmotivated, stressed, fatigued, or distracted, which is often enough.

Habit reversal

A more successful approach to habit change involves behavioral interventions such as habit reversal training. This technique has been used successfully to change a variety of unwanted habits—hair pulling, nail-biting, thumb sucking, nose picking, and others.

Habit reversal training involves:

• Increasing awareness of the unwanted habit (i.e., when or where it occurs).
• Engaging in a competing response—that is, a replacement behavior incompatible with the habit.
• Relaxation training.
• Reinforcing the competing response.

The selection of a suitable replacement response is a key part of the training. Getting it right requires trial and error.

For example, if you want to stop biting your nails, you might have to try a few replacement behaviors (e.g., playing with the ring on your finger, clicking a pen, squeezing a stress ball) until you find one that works.

A different reward system

Opportunities for habit change often present themselves when old rewards lose their effectiveness and, as a result, we become aware of the habitual nature of the behavior.

We then have the opportunity to use a reward structure that reinforces a healthier habit. But for this to work, the new reward must be delivered consistently and immediately after the desired behavior.

Here is an example. The reward of doing the chores (e.g., cleaning the apartment), can be playing your favorite video game or watching your favorite movie/TV show.

Remember to do the pleasurable activity each time you clean, and immediately after the chore is done. This regularity facilitates associating cleaning with something fun and enjoyable, and strengthening the habit.

Changing context cues

Have you noticed changes in your habitual shopping behavior after a local grocery store rearranges its layouts? This is because changing context cues affect habitual behavior.

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Changing context cues often occurs naturally and as a consequence of life course changes—going to college, starting a new job, getting married, retiring, etc.

It is important to look for such opportunities or create them yourself. As a client once shared with me, she noticed that just moving to another apartment building in the same neighborhood disrupted old habits:

Not living next to McDonald's and Taco Bell restaurants, she said, provided a window of opportunity to form healthier eating habits. And she took full advantage of it to shed pounds and, more importantly, keep them off.

Imposing or reducing friction

One last strategy we consider involves modifying friction (i.e. the task’s difficulty and time required). To make healthy behaviors habitual, reduce friction. To break bad habits, add friction.

This is what I told an acquaintance complaining about her little boy’s unhealthy eating habits.

I had noticed jars filled with Chips Ahoy, Oreos, and other fatty and sweet snacks in several locations around the house, all easily accessible to the child.

I suggested to the mother that she needs to make it more difficult and time-consuming for him to consume cookies. Especially compared with fruits and vegetables—which were all the way in the kitchen, unwashed and unpeeled.

Takeaway

We like to think we live our lives purposefully and mindfully, but in reality we do a lot of things habitually.

Habits refer to associations formed between context cues and responses to those cues (e.g., associating sitting on the sofa with watching TV).

Study rituals, eating and drinking habits, and bedtime routines can all be habitual.

A major reason breaking bad habits is challenging is that they are no longer as dependent on goals as they were during the formation phase. Simply put, they have become automatic.

Source: Wood, 2024 (adapted by Arash Emamzadeh)

Luckily, there are science-based strategies that can help. See Figure 1. for a summary. Aside from behavioral approaches (e.g., habit reversal training), these strategies require making changes in the following areas:

• Reward system: To turn a healthy behavior into a habit, first think of an effective reward. Then, use the reward consistently and immediately after you perform the healthy behavior.
• Context cues: Make changes to your environment in such a way to prevent the bad habit and promote the good one—rearrange your desk or apartment, take a different route, relocate to a new neighborhood, etc.
• Friction: Increase the difficulty of performing the bad habit. At the same time, make it easier and less time-consuming to perform the good habit.

To learn more science-based strategies for forming healthy habits and breaking bad habits, see my previous article here.