{"id":55770,"date":"2019-03-13T03:00:58","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T03:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focusme.com\/?p=55770"},"modified":"2024-04-24T13:56:35","modified_gmt":"2024-04-24T12:56:35","slug":"how-to-get-rid-of-bad-habits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusme.com\/blog\/how-to-get-rid-of-bad-habits\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Get Rid Of Bad Habits"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quick recap….<\/strong><\/p>\n

As you might remember, we recently discussed habits, how they work in our brains, and how we can create new habits that will make us more productive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Basically, it comes down to this:<\/p>\n

You have a cue, which triggers you to perform the behaviour.<\/p>\n

Then there is the behaviour itself, which is what you want to do on a regular basis.<\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s the reward, which implants the desire to perform the behaviour in your brain.<\/p>\n

Over time, the reward will create a \u2018craving\u2019, which will make you want to perform the behaviour. One good example is smoking. Even though nicotine isn\u2019t physically addictive (at least not in the same way drugs like heroin are), it\u2019s still very habit-forming.<\/p>\n

This craving stays, even if you stop providing a reward at the end.<\/p>\n

Last week, we discussed how you can use this knowledge to create new habits. This week, we\u2019ll look at habits from a different angle. More specifically, we\u2019re going to teach you how to get rid of old, bad habits.<\/p>\n

A song of booze and fire<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, habits have a downside. There are bad ones, and they can have nasty consequences. Some people get into the habit of drinking alcohol regularly. Others start smoking. Both of these habits are detrimental to your health. Drinking and smoking, over time, cause damage to your body and can lead to serious disease, such as liver damage, lung cancer, and psychological problems.<\/p>\n

Just like with any habit, habitual smoking and drinking consists of a cue, a behaviour, and a reward.<\/p>\n

The cue can be just about anything. Maybe it\u2019s when you feel a bit down, or every time you enter a bar, or just some time of day that tells your brain it\u2019s \u2018time to light up a smoke\u2019 or \u2018time to have a drink\u2019.<\/p>\n

The behaviour is the smoking and drinking itself.<\/p>\n

The reward is the high you feel from smoking a cigarette, or the blissful intoxication that being drunk makes you feel.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Wolverine, but with cigarettes<\/em><\/p>\n

Over time, both smoking and drinking induce a craving, where merely the anticipation of the actual reward causes the \u2018neurological reward\u2019.<\/p>\n

Once that happens, you\u2019ve got yourself a bad habit.<\/p>\n

Now, the main question is: can you \u2018delete\u2019 bad habits from your brain, so there remains no trace of them in your basal ganglia?<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, no.<\/p>\n

How Alcoholics Stop Being Alcoholics<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

This thought might be a depressing one, but once you\u2019re addicted to alcohol (which means that you\u2019ve made a habit of drinking), you will stay an alcoholic for the rest of your life. This is not a controversial opinion, it\u2019s more or less an established fact. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.<\/p>\n

The repetition of a habit firmly enshrines it into your brain, and someone who has once been addicted to alcohol can\u2019t drink a single drop, because the risk of relapse is immense. If someone who has been sober for years suddenly has a beer at a barbecue, chances are big that they\u2019ll be downing entire bottles of whiskey every day by the end of the month.<\/p>\n

Okay, I might be dramatizing a bit, but I\u2019m just trying to make a point: you can\u2019t delete habits from your brain.<\/p>\n

But there are ways to work around this. Alcoholics Anonymous has gotten hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, to stop drinking, so the question is: how do they do it?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

They told me the devil would be attractive<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s simple: they talk about it.<\/p>\n

In AA meetings, there are no special treatments or pills. There\u2019s no methadone, and there are no electroshocks. All they do is talk. And it works.<\/p>\n

You see, it\u2019s what they talk about that is important. In AA, people discuss why they started drinking, and what makes them drinking, and how drinking makes them feel. Notice anything here?<\/p>\n

In essence, they gain insight in the cues, the behaviours and the rewards of their habitual drinking. AA also serves as a social replacement to \u2018hanging out with your buddies in the local bar\u2019. Instead of going to a place where everybody is supposed to drink, they go to a place, where it\u2019s the opposite: nobody is supposed to drink there.<\/p>\n

So when it\u2019s Friday or Saturday evening (the cue), instead of going to the bar (the behaviour) for social contact (the reward), they replace the bar with an AA meeting.<\/p>\n

The cue and rewards are kept, it\u2019s only the behaviour that changes.<\/p>\n

That is why:<\/p>\n

YOU CAN\u2019T EXTINGUISH A BAD HABIT. YOU CAN ONLY CHANGE IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By keeping the same cue and reward, but substituting the behaviour, you can trick your brain into getting rid of a bad habit, without actually \u2018removing\u2019 it.<\/p>\n

So, to summarize:<\/p>\n

USE THE SAME CUE<\/strong><\/p>\n

USE THE SAME REWARD<\/strong><\/p>\n

CHANGE THE ROUTINE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bad habits in the digital age<\/strong><\/p>\n

These days, smoking and drinking aren\u2019t necessarily the most common bad habits anymore. The negative consequences of tobacco use are known far and wide, and cigarettes have lost the aura of \u2018cool\u2019 that they have enjoyed in past decades. Finding pictures of musicians and movie stars with a smoke in their hand is actually hard to do these days. And every year, the number of people that smoke cigarettes drops..<\/p>\n

Fair enough, alcohol use is still a common thing, but then again, more and more people are becoming more conscious of their health in general.<\/p>\n

But there are new addictions on the horizon, that have made their introduction with the rise of the internet. These days, people are more likely to be addicted to checking their smartphone, hanging out on Facebook, Instagram, or venting their paragraph-long opinions on Twitter.<\/p>\n

Instead of gorging on fast food, we gorge on YouTube videos, checking out one after the other, clicking through to find new music clips, movie trailers, video blogs and playthroughs of video games.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have to go all the way to the store to buy a new video game anymore. Just open Steam, click a few times, and you\u2019re good to go.<\/p>\n

We also have access to a nearly unlimited amount of TV shows on Netflix, and a more or less unlimited amount of music through Spotify. It used to be that you had to wait a day or a week for a new episode of your favorite show. Today, you can just watch the entire season in one go. After that, you can do the same with hundreds of other shows.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone. Wherever you are, at any time of day, you\u2019re able to expose yourself to the whole range of digital habits, high rewards included.<\/em><\/p>\n

But above all, there\u2019s the number one offender: internet pornography. In the past we never had the massive amount of exposure to lots of naked women (or men), let alone the extreme stuff that goes on in some of the videos that you can find online. We\u2019ve grown so accustomed to this extreme stuff that it\u2019s become hard to get aroused by normal looking people and by normal situations.<\/p>\n

Watching porn is possibly the worst and most unhealthy habit that you can acquire through computer use. Science has documented that frequent porn use can lead to:<\/p>\n