Make harmful habits harder to do

I tend to eat when I’m anxious, sad, or overwhelmed. My brain wants those substance hits (usually sugar-related) and, if it’s easy, I’ll eat all day long.

If it’s easy; that’s the key.

One of the best ways to break or replace bad habits is to make them harder to do, or even to hide them away completely.

With overeating, I did the following:

  1. I threw away all the junk food and expired items.
  2. I deleted every food delivery app and phone number from my cell phone.
  3. I bought a big stock of sardines, jerky, salami, eggs, nuts, and other healthy foods that I can eat without preparation (or without much preparation, at least).

With that, whenever I want to eat something I won’t have sugary treats: I’ll only have foods that are “heavier,” and that makes it harder to overeat.

If I really want to eat a pizza or Chinese food I can still order it, but just the fact that I need to Google a place and make a phone call is enough to make me reconsider. Reconsidering – that pause between having an impulse and acting on it – is usually enough to make me stop on my tracks. That’s not always the case, but it certainly helps.

This can be true for every other habit as well. Do you play too many video games? Delete them all and re-download them Friday night to play on the weekend. Do you use your phone too much in bed, which prevents you from falling asleep faster? Put your charger in another room.

We are creatures of habit. Make something hard to do – or even just less convenient – and you might see a significant change.

2 thoughts on “Make harmful habits harder to do

  1. Yo @dirceu, how’s going? I remember reading this and my fish-mind promptly forgot it. But this week I am on a self-enforced staycation and I remembered your this article. I was overwhelmed with information and I think the same applied to me with regards to over consumption of information. Here are the things I did
    1. logged out of all social media accounts (similar to deleting all food delivery apps). Many many times my muscle memory kicked in and I typed say twitter.com but just the thought of having to enter my pwd and then passing 2FA stopped me in tracks from logging in. That’s a win.
    2. I didn’t delete all social media apps but I did hid them in a folder and banished that folder to the 7th screen on my iPhone lol
    3. I replaced my sweets (social media) with healthier nuts(Go lang course) so I’m now gaining healthy information instead of dopamine shots.

    Hope you are doing well there.

Leave a Reply to Ashish Dasnurkar Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.