Hijacking habits

My college (and then Google) friend [Tristan Harris](http://www.tristanharris.com/) has been doing some great work communicating the dangers of “attention-hacking” and the dark sides of social technology. A recent video he made on [how the instant gratification of smartphones creates bad habits](http://bigthink.com/videos/tristan-harris-how-your-phone-disconnects-you-from-reality) got me thinking about how I’ve successfully stopped bad habits and started good ones in the past.

**1. Hijack bad habits with good ones**

[BJ Fogg](https://www.bjfogg.com/), an expert on persuasive technology who taught Tristan at Stanford, runs a “[Tiny Habits]” course that emphasizes creating “triggers” that will remind you to do your new habit. I find that I can often use the urge to do a bad habit as my trigger to instead do my new good habit.

Charles Duhigg, author of [The Power of Habit](https://smile.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081298160X?sa-no-redirect=1), calls this “routine replacement”– hijacking the cue and the reward, and inserting a different routine between them.

In my method, the bad habit isn’t technically “forbidden”–it’s just delayed and distracted enough by the good habit that it usually has no power left.

I also find it’s helpful to use a good habit that’s in the opposite direction as the bad habit–if the bad habit is eating junk food, the good habit is eating brocolli

**2. Make those new good habits as small as possible**

Right now I have a rule that I will do 1 pushup per day, and take one mindful breath per day.

Now, by the time I get down on the floor to do that 1 pushup, or take the time to have one mindful breath, I almost always end up doing a lot more. But even if I don’t, the success of completing the habit each day is the strongest reinforcement I’ve found to solidify it.

—

A few small examples of how I’ve applied this strategy:

* *Before I check my social media feeds*, I take 10 mindful breaths
* *Before I read blog posts*, I write one (that’s what I’m doing now!)
* *Before I eat candy or junk food*, I eat a vegetable
* *Before I drink a beer or glass of wine*, I drink two glasses of water
* *Before I say (or write) something bad about someone*, I say something good about them

As you might imagine, doing the good habit first usually kills the urge to do the bad one. Some of the good habits address the same core needs as bad ones but in different ways (giving the mind something to focus on; learning something new; satisfying hunger; quenching thirst); others provide a cognitive dissonance that makes it hard to follow one with the other (saying good then bad things about someone).

It sometimes feels trivial to optimize such small things, but they add up. [As Annie Dillard wrote](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/530337-how-we-spend-our-days-is-of-course-how-we):

> How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.