What are the 7 steps to breaking a habit?

There are seven steps you can take to break that bad habit. Step 1, Admit the Challenge, is the first step, where you have to admit it’s inhibiting your progress. If that’s the case, then say this to yourself right now, with as much conviction as you can muster: I have a problem with [fill in the blank]. Step 2 is Understand How Habits Work, where we need to understand how it does work, which will enable us to break its power over us. A habit has three components: The trigger, the behavior, and the reward. Step 3 is State What You Want Instead, where it’s time to state what you want instead, such as I want to find other ways to relieve my anxiety besides smoking. Step 4 is Swap the Behavior, where the goal is to replace the behavior while keeping the trigger and the reward in place. Step 5 is Track Your Progress, where tracking progress not only keeps your intention front and center, it can also deepen your resolve and maintain momentum. Step 6 is Seek Outside Help, where if necessary, seek outside resources, such as a business coach, a personal trainer, Weight Watchers, and the list goes on. Step 7 is Stay the Course, where the transformation won’t happen overnight, and the final step is to simply persist, keeping at it until you consistently get the results you want. It takes close to seventy days of hard work to replace an old habit with a new one.

To break a habit, you need to identify the habits so that you can change them, think about the things you do each day – are they serving you to be a better version of yourself or are they holding you back. Once you are aware of the habit, you need to do a bit of detective work to understand it better. You should think about the ‘why behind the habit’, there is a reason you do what you do, are you tired, and can’t get through your day without the coffee, are you stressed and need the wine to defrag after work, are you bored so you eat in the afternoon. You need to look at addressing the underlying cause behind the habit. The easiest way to stop an unhealthy habit is to replace it with something positive, instead of your coffee in the morning, could you have herbal tea, instead of the wine, what about talking it out with your partner, or going for a walk. You should try to cut the triggers out, have friends that smoke and you’re trying to give up, avoid them, sitting near the cookie jar at work, move it. Be with the people who are rooting for your success, be mindful of the people you surround yourself in and hang out with the people who will help with your success. Don’t aim for perfection, it’s OK to fail sometimes when you’re giving up a habit, as you’re shifting, you may slip up from time to time, make sure you celebrate your success and avoid dwelling on the failures. Make the replacement habits easy, when starting a new habit make an effort to make it as easy as possible to complete, for instance, if you’re going to go for a walk in the morning, place your clothes and shoes right near your bed so that when you wake up they are right in front of you.

Identify cues. Something has to trigger a habit, and a cue can be anything. Once you know the cues, you can throw bad habits off track. Disrupt. If the alarm cues you to bash the snooze button every morning, put the alarm clock on the other side of the room. Replace. Research shows that replacing a bad behavior with a good one is more effective than stopping the bad behavior alone. Keep It simple. It’s usually hard to change a habit because the behavior has become easy and automatic. Think long-term. Habits often form because they satisfy short-term impulses, the way chewing on your nails might immediately calm your nerves. Persist. Research has shown that what you’ve done before is a strong indicator of what you’ll do next.