Why We Get Stuck in Bad Habits and How to Break The Habit Loop

The power to shape our habits is the most important skill for cultivating wellbeing and happiness.

I realize that’s a radical claim.  But think about it.  Bad habits – over eating, distraction, work addiction, or substance abuse – can ruin our life.  They keep us locked into automatic, self-destructive, behaviors that relentlessly undermine our marriages, physical health, and emotional wellbeing. 

Good habits – exercise, good eating, mindfulness, and wise action – do the reverse.  They improve our minds, bodies, and relationships.

So learning to shape your habits is like developing a superpower.  And yet, when it comes to the question of how to do this, I find that there’s something missing – something that makes all the difference when it comes to our ability to create new habits and disrupt old ones.

The Conventional View of Habit

But first, some background. Here’s the conventional view of how habits work:

Image Courtesy Charles Duhigg

Example: smartphone addiction.  You hear a chime or feel a vibration in your pocket (Cue), you then instinctively reach for your phone and check your texts or email (Ritual).  The moment this occurs, you experience a small burst of dopamine, the brain’s pleasure chemical (Reward).  And that instantaneous hit of pleasure keeps you coming back for more.

So how can we break out of the loop?  In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg argues for “The Golden Rule of Habit Change.”  He claims that the way to break bad habits is to keep the same cue and reward but change the ritual. 

Back to smartphones. He’s saying that when you hear the chime of your phone (Cue), insert a new ritual and then see if you can link it to a similar reward. For example:

• Cue:  iPhone chime.  New Ritual:  Look out the window.  Reward:  Beautiful view
• Cue:  iPhone chime.  New Ritual:  Eat a blueberry.  Reward: Tastes so good

Basically, the strategy here is to find something else when you experience the cue that also brings you pleasure.  

The Dangers of Pleasure Chasing 

Here’s the problem:  breaking bad habits is inherently uncomfortable. Not eating the chips, stopping after just one Netflix episode, not having that extra drink – stepping outside of these habitual urges is just no fun, even if we find some clever way to reward ourselves. And, let’s face it, chewing gum isn’t a cigarette, an Arnold Palmer isn’t a gin and tonic.  These substitutes never match the pleasure of the original habit. 

So what’s the missing step to breaking the loop of habit?  It’s an insight that I stole from the 19th century American psychologist William James. Here it is in his words:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.  That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points.

Translation:  the best way to shift out of old habits is by training your ability to welcome the discomfort that comes with breaking routine.   Notice that James isn’t talking about finding a pleasurable substitute.  He’s talking about building the inner resolve to act outside the ordinary constraints of pain and pleasure.

Going back to the smartphone (something James never had to deal with).  His advice might be to hear the chime (Cue) and then do nothing, just watch yourself squirm and use that moment of being present with discomfort to build your ability to stand steady in the face of your desire to distract yourself. 

The Practice of Habit Disruption

This shift from pleasure chasing to staying with the discomfort of breaking routine is what I'm calling "habit disruption." It's a way to loosen the grip of pleasure.  And while this isn’t easy, James gives us a practice for training this skill:

Do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

The practice: consciously welcome discomfort.   And what he’s saying here is that by courting discomfort, we train the most essential skill of habit disruption:  our ability to resist the urge of these base pleasures that keep us locked in the loop of habit.

The most amazing thing about this practice is that it begins to unwind our instinctive resistance to discomfort.  We usually recoil from things that make us feel uneasy and out of our comfort zone. But now we’re giving ourselves permission to welcome it in.  We’re rewiring the architecture of the mind to set us up for building better habits.

Once we train ourselves to resist the urge to get that next hit of dopamine-induced pleasure, once we can stand firm on the shaky ground of discomfort, we can act outside the constraints of ordinary habit.  

We become free – free to put down the chips, the phone, the drink, the TV remote, or whatever it is that keeps us caught in these endless loops of habit.  And that’s no small thing. 

If you try out this practice, how did it work for you?  Were you able to shift out of bad habits more easily?  What came up for you in those edgy moments of allowing discomfort in?

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Author Bio

Nate Klemp, PhD, is the Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Life Cross Training (LIFE XT), a company devoted to giving professionals the tools to train resilience, wellbeing, and peak performance.  Along with Eric Langshur, he is the co-author the New York Times Bestseller Start Here: Master the Lifelong Habit of Wellbeing.  Nate holds a B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University and a PhD from Princeton University. @LIFE_XT or @DrNateKlemp

To measure your current state of mental and emotional fitness, try out the free, scientifically-validated, LIFE XT Human Performance Assessment.