The trick to breaking bad habits is to find an approach that works for you and the particular habit – beyond going cold turkey. Not all habits are created equally, and they can’t all be broken in the same way. That said, it is possible to get over bad habits when the right method is used.
This article contains tips on breaking “typical bad habits” as well as bad financial habits that many fail to recognize as such.
How to Break Bad Habits
When you’re ready to learn how to stop bad habits, the following tips can help.
1. Replace a Habit With a New One
Part of the habit is the routine that follows the initial trigger, so to reduce the impact of stopping a habitual behavior, you can replace it with another habit that has a more positive and healthy impact on your life.
Smoking, for example can be swapped for other activities such as:
- Chewing a piece of gum
- Eating some fruit
- Getting a drink
- Going for a walk
- Playing with something in your hands, like a stress ball
The key is to distract yourself long enough that the temptation to perform the negative habit passes.
Dopamine plays a huge role in whether a habit sticks or breaks. If you do something over and over, and dopamine is there when you’re doing it, that strengthens the habit even more.”
2. Dig Into the True Sources
Some people can’t find the motivation to change, even in situations where they know the habit is bad. The simple desire to change isn’t going to cut it.
Dig deeper. Think about what’s going to change in your life if you take this commitment seriously.
3. Look For Your Fears And Excuses
Not long after you show a bit of progress, we often run into two other deterrents: fears and excuses.
- “Smoking relieves my stress.”
- “Eating makes me feel good, even when I’m already stuffed.”
- “Drinking a few glasses of wine every night is the only way I can deal with my stress.”
These stories are powerful, and changing them to something else can be difficult to do. We also use those stories for things we think we can’t do. Understanding the stories that we tell ourselves uncovers our fears and excuses, and given time, you can train yourself to change those stories around.
4. Celebrate Small Successes
Whether you are breaking a habit in 21 days or 21 weeks, you need to celebrate every day where you haven’t repeated the habit. If you can only manage two days before cracking, then celebrate those two days.
Researchers from the University College London surveyed over 96 people over three months, and found that new habits took an average of 66 days to stick.
5. Transform Your Habit Loop
Even with all these strategies in place, you can still be stuck on how to stop a bad habit permanently. Another alternative method is to pay attention to your habit loop and learn to break it that way.
A habit loop is broken into three parts:
- The cue, or trigger: signals the brain to start the habit.
- The routine: actual action that’s inspired by the cue.
- The reward: outcome you get from the action.
Because there are three points, you can learn how to quit bad habits in three fashions from this. Those are:
- Recognize your cues: Things like stress, anxiety, boredom, loneliness, celebrations, or other such moods could be what starts the habit. Every habit we get into begins with a trigger or emotions of some kind.
- Challenge the routine: Make it tougher to perform the routine or work to replace it. Spend too much time on your phone? Get it off your desk or out of the room you’re in. In the case of replacing it, you can look at another activity to break up the sequence that gives you the same relief to those emotions from the cues above.
- Mix up the reward: One way to look at bad habits is to make the reward unsatisfying.
Another angle is looking at what other rewards can make you feel the same way you’re feeling from before. For example, if you drink a lot of soda, replace it with water and focus on how refreshing it is compared to soda.
6. Use Digital Tools to Your Advantage
Digital or just general cell phone use is one well-known habit that many of us are trying to cut down on. However, digital tools can be used to help us break a habit, either through reminders to keep us on track or rewards when we’re changing or creating a new positive habit. Keeping track of a newly formed habit in the form of a “streak” is a great way to keep you focused and motivated.
There are plenty of streak apps that let you create a streak, set reminders, and receive mini visual rewards when you hit certain milestones.
7. Find a Habit-Crushing Partner
Breaking habits is hard, but finding support from a friend or partner can be incredibly helpful in keeping you focused on repeating your new habit or stopping you from repeating an old one.
Help from a partner could come in the following forms:
- Simply asking how you are doing with stopping your habit — this keeps the habit in the forefront, so you don’t relapse.
- Helping you remove the triggers from your shared environment, so the temptations are reduced.
- Sharing the new reward with you if you’re changing a habit rather than removing it.
- Finding a habit you both want to stop and doing it together.
8. Stack Your Habits
Simply put, link old habits to new ones.
For example, if your goal is to learn 10 minutes of French each day, you do this after you’ve made your coffee each morning.
9. Visualize New Habits
Visualization can help with breaking habits. However, the important part isn’t visualizing the outcome but visualizing the process or the routines you need to create to achieve it.
Practicing visualization also helps to reduce anxiety around breaking a habit. In some cases, the habit you’re trying to break might cause you to stress simply by thinking about it. Visualizing a positive routine helps with this, even if you do it for only 2-3 minutes daily.
10. Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness is about being present in the moment and being aware of your thoughts and can, therefore, be a useful tool when learning how to break a bad habit.
By practicing mindfulness and becoming more aware of your triggers, you will increase the likelihood of success in breaking the habit.
Mindfulness doesn’t mean you fight or block these thoughts. It simply allows you to engage with them more productively.
What’s Your Bad Financial Habit?
Bad financial habits can ruin you. Always ordering an appetizer when you eat out (when you can’t afford it), paying unnecessary late fees on your credit card bill (because you procrastinate), not knowing your credit score which can cost you thousands on loans and insurance rates (because you’re too passive).
These are just a handful of bad habits that many possess. Do you have one of them?
Below are experiences of people with bad financial habits and how they overcame them. Read and learn some of the strategies that worked for them.
Habit #1: Losing track of your money.
This amount of money was never accounted for, it was like ghost money. We put a plan into action and been saving every month way more than those $300.00 To break the bad habit of paying credit card bills late, I did two things:
- Set up automatic payments online. So that if I do goof up and pay late, at least I don’t have $29 late/penalty fees in addition to the interest.
- Check all my credit card and bank accounts online every few days. I keep track of all new transactions, so I know if any bank accounts are approaching zero, and see within a couple of days any new credit card statements that have been generated. When I see a new credit card statement, I schedule a payment online for a day before the due date.
Habit #2: Make it a priority.
Our Roth and 529 contributions are treated like bill payments. They are scheduled to automatically send every month out of our checking account.
Habit #3: Automation is the key
I’ve got a couple, but the best one was automating all of my bills to stop late payments & reconnect fees I also have a $500 ‘cushion’ in my checking that was not added to the register to cover in case on of those automated bills hits before I deposit my check
Habit #4: Utilize what’s free
Open a free, no minimum balance, checking account with a debit card and automatically transfer your agreed upon and BUDGETED “allowance” into the account each week. When the money is gone, wait until next week. Using a debit card requires discipline, unlike a credit card which is always a budget buster. I believe in keeping a minimal buffer of funds in a debit card account so I spend my small allowance down.
Habit #5: Make it “Excel-lent”
My husband and I use an excel spreadsheet that is very simple. the left column down lists income streams and the bills that we regularly pay separated by 1st and 15th of the month paydays. across the top we list each month. We also list non regular expenses such as taxes, vacations, gifts, etc. The expenses are subtracted from the income telling us if we “have more money than month.”
We are then able to tell right away whether or not we will have money available to take a weekend trip or attend a concert. Having the whole year’s payments on one sheet makes it easy to pull tax info together and look at areas for improvement in spending. We use our bank’s online bill pay so we don’t have to bother writing checks or finding the stamps.
Habit #6: Meal prep
My bad financial habit was buying lunch multiple times a week instead of bringing my lunch to work. What worked best for me to break that habit was to get in a routine of prepping the night before. When cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, I pack the leftovers into serving-size containers. That makes it easy to grab a lunch in the morning and there are no excuses because it’s already there.
I now buy a lunch a few times a year. I’m kind of proud of that. Of course, the step before “pack up the leftovers” was to break my bad habit of not cooking dinner (because if you don’t cook dinner, there are no leftovers). The bottom line is that a little extra time and conscious effort to prep — a few minutes at night (making lunch and also putting into the fridge what needs to be defrosted for tomorrow night’s dinner) and a couple of hours on the weekend (making a menu/list and going grocery shopping) — makes all the difference in our eating and therefore our financial habits.
Habit #7: Think of others
Perfume/Lotion: I broke my habit of buying expensive lotion and perfume after reading “The Ultimate Cheapskate’s Road Map to True Riches” by Jeff Yeager. Page 97 explains how we could feed the world’s hungry if we put the money we spend on perfume towards people who are starving. This just weighed so heavily on my heart, that every time I reach for some expensive cream or some perfume, I stop and think of a starving child. I started sponsoring a child in Honduras that costs me $60 a month. That’s money well spent, and it prevents me from buying more crap as I’m buying the unnecessary lotions, etc.
The Bottom Line
Everyone is different, so try different approaches to breaking habits. If you fail, look at why, adapt, try again, and don’t forget to celebrate what you have done well.
