Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(66)
Knowing the importance of harnessing the feeling of success, Juni celebrated when she went one day without sugar. A huge milestone. Even though she wasn’t always perfect, she continued on this path until she completed an entire week without eating any sugary snacks.
Juni knew the importance of being flexible and iterative, and she experimented with dozens of new habits. She was challenged by special occasions where sugar was everywhere, and if she occasionally succumbed to the siren call of cookie-dough ice cream, she wasn’t too hard on herself—she looked at it as a challenge to study and hack. She came up with work-arounds for moments of vulnerability, and through trial and error, she discovered what worked and what didn’t while she remained compassionate with herself and celebrated her wins.
These wins compounded quickly, and Juni’s multipronged approach started to pay off and made her feel as if she could choose to eat sugar or not. Her addiction had held her hostage, and now she knew she could change that. Juni had completed Behavior Design Boot Camp in March. At the end of May, she sent me an e-mail telling me that she had done it.
Juni had beaten sugar.
When Juni told me that she had stopped her sugar habit using the skills learned through Behavior Design and Tiny Habits, I was proud of her, and it inspired me to share my methods on stopping bad habits more widely. I had found success stopping my own bad habits throughout the years, but I had kept my focus on helping people create new positive habits. I was also hesitant to wade into the territory of bad habits too deeply because I am not an addiction specialist, and conversations about bad habits often quickly turn to substance abuse and compulsive behaviors. I didn’t want to take on the role of a therapist or a medical doctor. I knew that Tiny Habits is not the answer to serious addictions. But for people with bad habits that are not serious addictions, I have good news: Tiny Habits can be game changing.
A helpful way to think about habits is to put them into three categories. I’m talking about all habits here—good and bad. Uphill Habits are those that require ongoing attention to maintain but are easy to stop—getting out of bed when your alarm goes off, going to the gym, or meditating daily.
Downhill Habits are easy to maintain but difficult to stop—hitting snooze, swearing, watching YouTube.
Freefall Habits are those habits like substance abuse that can be extremely difficult to stop unless you have a safety net of professional help.
To help you get rid of your Downhill Habits, I’ve created a new system called the Behavior Change Masterplan. This system provides a comprehensive approach to follow step by step so you don’t need to guess at solutions.
My plan is built—of course—on the Behavior Model.
B=MAP is the foundation for designing new habits and saying good-bye to habits that are holding you back. In previous chapters, we focused on how to make things easier. Now we’ll talk about how to make them harder (decreasing ability). Instead of building in effective prompts, you’ll look for ways to remove them. Instead of trying to ramp up your motivation, you’ll consider ways to reduce it for an unwanted habit.
Before we jump into the Behavior Change Masterplan, let’s step back and deconstruct how we’ve been taught to view bad habits. This is a major part of the problem, after all.
Like positive habits, bad habits exist on a continuum of easy to change and hard to change. When you get toward the “hard” end of the spectrum, note the language you hear—breaking bad habits and battling addiction. It’s as if an unwanted behavior is a nefarious villain to be aggressively defeated. But this kind of language (and the approaches it spawns) frames these challenges in a way that isn’t helpful or effective. I specifically hope we will stop using this phrase: “break a bad habit.” This language misguides people. The word “break” sets the wrong expectation for how you get rid of a bad habit. This word implies that if you input a lot of force in one moment, the habit will be gone. However, that rarely works, because you usually cannot get rid of an unwanted habit by applying force one time.
Instead of “break,” I suggest a different word and a different analogy. Picture a tangled rope that’s full of knots. That’s how you should think about unwanted habits like stressing out, too much screen time, and procrastinating. You cannot untangle those knots all at once. Yanking on the rope will probably make things worse in the long run. You have to untangle the rope step by step instead. And you don’t focus on the hardest part first. Why? Because the toughest tangle is deep inside the knot.
You have to approach it systematically and find the easiest knot to untangle.
Juni first listed all the tangles in her sugar-habit knot. Then she addressed the most accessible one—going without dessert after dinner on only one day, then two days. Next, she got rid of her break-room ice cream stash. Eventually, she worked up to removing the ice cream from her home freezer. The process of untangling soon gained momentum. What felt so scary before—dealing with grief without sugar—started to feel less panic inducing. Successfully making it through one evening without dessert showed her something important—that she was stronger than she thought. Just as important, she began to see how all the tangles were connected. And that’s when things began to transform rapidly. If she had followed conventional wisdom on breaking bad habits—swapping out a donut for a celery stick—she probably would have given up before long because doing something by willpower alone is hard, and hard is often impossible to sustain. Plus, if you don’t want to do a behavior in the first place (if she didn’t really want celery), then the good habit won’t wire in. And then she would have felt terrible about falling short, and this would have reinforced a cycle of failure.