By Annabel Stone and Phillippa Lally, University of Surrey, UK

The New Year is often a time where we aim for change, determined to form new habits and to leave our bad habits behind as the clock strikes midnight. Dusting off our running trainers, filling our shopping trollies with fresh fruit and veg… who hasn’t thought “New Year, New Me”? But a month down the line, why is it our trainers have only seen daylight twice, and that fresh fruit is starting to fur? It seems our bad habits have followed us into the New Year. 

Psychologists define habits as the process that leads us to enact behaviours automatically when we encounter the situation (our cue) in which we have frequently performed that behaviour in the past. That “cue” could be emotional, such as feelings of stress evoking a desire to eat chocolate, or social, such as having a pint of beer every time you join friends at the pub, or a physical location, for example when I walk into that coffee shop I always order a latte. Needless to say, feeling motivated to leave bad habits in the past won’t necessarily prevent you from acting automatically next time you encounter your habit cue.

The underlying mechanism of habit is a mental association between a cue and an action. We haven’t yet worked out how to erase that association. However, habit researchers list  four ways that you can disrupt the habit process so that the habitual behaviour is not performed:

1. Avoid your habit cue: If you don’t encounter the cue, you won’t perform the habitual behaviour. However, for this to work people must be aware of the cues that trigger their bad habits. For example, if socialising at the pub is a cue that triggers excessive alcohol consumption, suggesting a different location to socialise with friends can be a useful strategy. One way to identify cues is to keep a diary of when unwanted habitual behaviour occurs and what happened just beforehand.
2. Make it harder to perform the behaviour: Adding “friction”, such that an action becomes completely inaccessible or too effortful to enact, can help prevent unwanted habitual behaviour. It means that when a cue is encountered performing the behaviour requires exerting effort, triggering a conscious decision-making process instead of a habitual response. However, this requires you to be able to change how easy it is to perform the behaviour. If you live with other people who insist on having chocolate in the house, you can’t remove the chocolate entirely.  
3. Just say no: We can, of course, exert self-control and not perform our habits. This requires that upon encountering the cue for an unwanted habit, willpower and motivation are used to abstain. However, this only works if habit cues have been identified and then people vigilantly monitor their environment so that at the crucial moment they are focusing enough to stop themselves. Otherwise, the moment can pass, with realisation only coming later. It also requires motivation for better choices to be maintained, which in the moment can be challenging. 
4. Find a substitute: The final option is to identify a new behaviour that can form into a habit to displace the unwanted habit. Again, the first step is to identify the habit cue. The new behaviour then needs to be consistently performed on encountering this cue. Over time the association between the cue and the new behaviour should become stronger than the old habit association. This requires monitoring and stopping yourself acting as before, but doing something is easier than doing nothing, so this is likely to be easier than option 3. To give this the best chance of working, the new behaviour needs to be as appealing as the unwanted habitual behaviour. For example, replacing a chocolate eating habit with fruit may not be successful if the individual does not feel the same or a greater level of satisfaction from eating fruit.

 

Practical recommendations:

1. Learn your cues! The first step in breaking bad habits is to know and understand what triggers them. Is it a certain environment? A particular time of day? An emotional state? Knowing this is the key to knowing how to break it.
2. Create a buffer. Taking preventative measures can be a fantastic way to inhibit your ability to engage in an unwanted habit. If you know it is impossible to avoid the cue, for example feeling stressed may cue eating chocolate, then by making a conscious effort to avoid buying chocolate during your weekly food shop you can make it more difficult to eat chocolate when you are stressed.
3. Think: ‘Just say no!’. Once you are aware of your cues, you can be on the lookout for them. If you know you are going to be encountering an unavoidable cue, make a conscious effort to vigilantly monitor cues and inhibit the unwanted response by maintaining awareness of your actions, and thinking ‘just say no!’.
4. Replace bad with good. If you can replace your bad behaviour association with another, you can in turn transform your unwanted habit into a positive one. For this to be successful, you may need to try couple of things. For example, if you know that you are spending too many of your evenings having a beer, an example approach could be as follows: 

1. Identify your cue (e.g, getting home from work). 
2. Remind yourself that when you get home, you may feel an urge get a beer. 
3. If you can, create a buffer. For example, can you not keep beer in the house, or move it out of the fridge so it is not cold? 
4. Create a replacement behaviour. When you get home have a non-alcoholic drink you enjoy or engage in an activity that helps you reduce your tension (e.g. read a book, play a computer game, phone a friend, or do some exercise). 

Disrupting bad habits is not easy. But, if you pay attention to them and use the strategies above they can be overcome.