How Do You Break a Bad Habit? You Don't.

In several different seminars I have been asked, “how do you break a bad habit?” and people are always shocked when I say, “you don’t.” In the work I have done over the years on consecutive consistent behavior, I have found that people do not break bad habits, they displace them.

Think about all the activities you do in a day and put them on a value scale. The scale starts at 0 which is equivalent to little or no value to 10 which is high value. As you place activities on the scale, bad habits are most likely placed lower on the scale. The key to getting rid of bad habits is to displace them with simple intentional activities that are more valuable than the habit. You do not simply stop doing a bad habit and you do not break it, you get rid of it.

My daughter Natalia asked the question about how Streaking helps get rid of bad habits one night while we were doing dishes together. When she asked, I happened to be washing a glass that had a little milk left in it. I put the glass under the slow stream of water from the faucet. As the clear water met the milk it turned cloudy. As water filled the glass it remained cloudy, but less so as more clear water was added. Eventually the water and milk overflowed the rim and I let it keep overflowing until only clear water was left in the glass. As I watched this process, I immediately understood how Streaking gets rid of bad habits.

The glass represents your life and your life is filled to the brim with activities. Those activities range in value from not at all valuable to highly valuable. You grow and progress by doing more valuable activities. If you could pour out all the less valuable activities and keep the valuable ones in your life you would; however, that’s not how life works. You can’t pick up your glass, pour everything out, and fill it with the most valuable activities. It just does not work. To get rid of bad habits and less valuable activities, you must displace them with more valuable activities through streaking.

You intentionally choose a laughably simple activity that is valuable to you such as, reading at least one paragraph in a book, and you set a streak to do read at least a paragraph every day. You change your focus from “not doing the bad habit” to “how many days in a row can I do this laughably simple activity?” As you keep record that you are reading at least a paragraph you see success, that every day success compounds and brings more success and through time you find that the more valuable activity of reading has displaced a less valuable activity or the bad habit.

You don’t break a bad habit, you displace it. You fill your days with laughably simple highly valuable streaks that fill your day and because your day is filled with value, there is no room for the bad habit.

Keep Streakin’

Jeff