Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(68)

If adding good habits to your life resolved all your unwanted behaviors, we could stop here. But weeds crop up in even the best-tended garden, so let’s continue.

It’s helpful to view phase one as a time of preparation. I know the word “preparation” sounds boring and tedious. But this phase can be fun if you pick new habits you enjoy and celebrate your successes. Your new habits, new skills, and new identity will be important as you move to phase two. That’s when you stare that tangled knot in the face and design your strategy.





PHASE #2—DESIGN FOR STOPPING A HABIT


The previous chapters have explained how to design your way into a habit, but you can also design your way out of a habit, and the Behavior Model will again be your foundation.

You can stop a behavior by altering any of the three components of the Behavior Model. You can decrease motivation or ability, or you can remove the prompt.

Making any one of those changes for the long term will stop the habit.

Sound easy?

Well, yes and no.

Most people could easily stop their Uphill Habits of daily exercise or getting out of bed at five a.m. But you’re not reading this because you want to stop those kinds of habits. You want to stop the Downhill Habits that are making you less healthy and happy.





Get specific to stop a habit


When it comes to stopping a bad habit, a common mistake is trying to motivate yourself toward an abstraction, such as “stop stressing out at work” or “stop eating junk food.” Those both sound specific, but they are not. They are abstract labels for a tangle of habits, what I call the General Habit. If you focus only on the General Habit, you probably won’t make much progress, just like if you focus on the entire knot at once, you can’t untangle it. You need to focus on specific tangles in order to make progress. That means finding specific habits to focus on. And the Swarm of Behaviors model will help you do that.





Write the General Habit that you want to stop in the cloud.





I want to stop . . .





Then list specific habits that contribute to the general one in the boxes surrounding the cloud. To show you what this looks like, I’ve filled out the next illustration for the General Habit of eating too much junk food.





Why these steps matter


If you focus only on your General Habit, you will probably feel frustrated or intimidated, and this can cause avoidance: I don’t have time right now or I’ll do it later.

However, after you list specific habits that relate to your general habit, untangling this big bad habit will feel more manageable.

When I first used this process to stop an unwanted habit, I was surprised that I could list more than fifteen specific things that contributed to my general habit of leaving things out of place around the house. Let me warn you here: After listing so many specific habits of being untidy at home, I felt kinda bad about myself. I was a bit surprised by the enormity of my clutter habit. Really? Was I that sloppy? Yes, I apparently was.

When you apply this method, I don’t want this temporary dark feeling to surprise you. It seems to happen with most people who follow this process because they are facing the reality of their bad habit. However, the dark feeling can soon turn around. As I looked over my specific habits of not being tidy, I found some I could untangle quickly and easily: Yes, I could stop leaving sweaters on the dresser, and I could stop stacking books on the kitchen counter. And that made my dark feeling go away.

With this plan, I felt in control. In fact, I started feeling quite optimistic. And that’s what you can expect as well. And with your early successes (no more sweaters on the dresser), you’ll be able to tackle some harder tangles.

So I’m saying this: When you see a bunch of specific habits to untangle, don’t stop there. And don’t get overwhelmed. Keep going. Pick one tangle and design it out of your life. But which specific habits should you tackle first?

The answer is so important, I’ll say it three times in different ways: Pick the easiest one. Pick the one you are most sure you can do. Pick the one that feels like no big deal.

People are often tempted to pick the hardest, stickiest habit to unwind, but that is a mistake. That’s like trying to untangle the tightest snarl deep inside a big knot. Start with the specific habit that will be the easiest for you to stop instead.

And it’s fine to pick more than one specific habit to unwind. The choice is yours, but whatever you decide, don’t overwhelm yourself. Remember that you are practicing the Skills of Change and learning along the way. Save the tough stuff for when you have more skills and momentum. You’ll find that subsequent snarls get easier to untangle as you gain know-how and confidence. And you might not need to address all of your specific habits because some of them will fall away on their own.

The steps here reflect the Behavior Design process I explained earlier in the book. Except now, for stopping a behavior, we are flipping things around. We are reverse engineering the habit. That means we map out what already exists in order to untangle it. In both situations—whether starting or stopping habits—designing for specific behaviors (instead of abstractions) is essential. When you have selected the specific habit you want to stop (the B in B=MAP), move on to the next step. Remember that if you remove motivation, ability, or prompt you can stop the specific habit, and my research shows there is an optimal order in this process. You start with the prompt. And that’s our next step in the Behavior Change Masterplan.