Have you ever tried to extinguish a bad habit? Probably lots of times. Just like me, you start out with determination and the best of intentions. You tell your family and friends, “If you see me doing this anymore, stop me.” It probably went well at first, but you kept thinking about it. You said to yourself, “I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m not going to do that anymore.”
But after a while, all this thinking about not doing something got in the way of your other thinking. Then there were the temptations as you saw other people doing it. Psychologist, Charles Duhigg the author of The Power of Habit defines all this in a four-step cycle. He says, anytime a habit is established, it’s dependent upon cues, which create a craving. And then the craving is satisfied by a response. And that response produces a reward. This is true of both good habits and bad habits. But here’s the problem. Once the neural pathway of a habit is established, it cannot be erased or eliminated. But it can be overridden by a stronger habit, one which replaces the bad habit.
A colleague of mine has compared this process to the functioning of a hard disc. When you delete a document, that data still remains on the disc until it is overridden by other data. It’s just not searchable. Of course, if you reformat the entire disc, then everything is erased. But you wouldn’t want to do that to your brain just to get rid of one bad habit.
However, no matter how well you have established a habit that overpowers the bad habit, if the cues of the bad habits begin to invade your environment or your thinking again, there’s a significant chance you will return to that bad habit because those cues will create a craving. This means that you need to be conscious of the environment in which the bad habit was created and do what you can to avoid those cues.
Sometimes this is easy, such as simply moving out of that environment. In other cases, it may very difficult because you have to live in that environment or work with those people. If you really want to drill down on this, I recommend the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. He provides a great in-depth explanation of how this process works. But bottom line, you can’t totally extinguish a habit, good or bad. You can only replace it with another. To do so successfully, begin with one, and only one, habit at a time. Understand that you will need to practice the new habit for at least 30 days, according to the most recent research. But don’t say to yourself, “It’s been 14 or 23 or 28 days since I did that,” because when you do that, all you’re doing is reminding yourself of the bad habit. So, what’s the one habit that you can begin to establish today to override a habit you’d like to get rid of?