Do you snack every night in front of the television? Do you drink a little too much when you are out with your friends? Do you ever find that you've smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, bitten off half your nails, or eaten an entire bag of Doritos without realizing you were doing it?
That's the real problem when it comes to ridding yourself of bad habits -- back in the beginning, when the behavior was new, it was something you did intentionally and probably consciously. But do anything enough times, and it becomes relatively automatic. In other words, you don't even need to know that you are doing it.
In fact, as new research shows, you don't even need to want to do it. If you develop the habit of snacking in front of your TV at night, how hungry you are or how tasty the snack is will no longer determine whether or how much you eat.
Many bad habits operate mindlessly, on autopilot. They are triggered by the context (e.g., watching TV, socializing, feeling stressed), rather than by any particular desire to engage in the behavior. So the key to stopping a bad habit isn't making a resolution -- it's figuring out how to turn off the autopilot. It's learning to disrupt the behavior, preferably before it starts.
Take for example a recent small study of movie theater popcorn-eating. Researchers invited about 100 people to watch 15 minutes of movie previews while seated in a real movie theater. They gave the participants free bags of popcorn and varied whether the popcorn was fresh or stale. (The stale popcorn was actually a week old. Yuck.) Then, they measured how much popcorn each person ate.
Not surprisingly, everyone who got the stale popcorn reported liking it less than those who got fresh. And people with a weak popcorn habit (e.g., those who didn't usually eat popcorn at the movies) ate significantly more fresh popcorn than stale. But here's the kicker -- for people with a strong popcorn habit (those who always ordered popcorn at the movies) it didn't matter how stale the popcorn was. They ate the same amount, whether it was an hour old or seven days old.
That's worth thinking about for a moment -- people with a strong habit were eating terrible popcorn, not because they didn't notice it was terrible, but because it didn't matter. The behavior was automatic, not intentional. So if tasting like Styrofoam won't keep you from eating something, what will?
The researchers found that there were, in fact, two effective ways to disrupt the automatic popcorn-eating.
First, you can disrupt the habit by changing the context. When they conducted the same study in the context of a conference room with 60 people, rather than at a movie theater, people with strong popcorn habits at the movie theater stopped eating the stale popcorn. The automatic popcorn-eating behavior wasn't activated, because the situational cues were changed.
If you have a habit you'd like to break, spend some time thinking about the situations in which it most often occurs. If you snack in front of the TV at night, consider doing something else in the evenings for a while -- reading a good book, spending time with friends or family, even surfing the web. Any alternative activity is less likely to trigger mindless eating. If you just can't give up your favorite shows, you might try rearranging the room or sitting in a different chair -- anything that alters the context can help.
Second, you can disrupt a habit by changing the method of performance. In another study, the researchers found that asking strong-habit popcorn eaters who were in a movie theater to eat with their non-dominant hand stopped them from eating the stale popcorn, too.
So if you can't change the situation, you can change the way the habit gets executed. If you mindlessly eat or smoke with your right hand, try only using your left. If you mindlessly drink from the glass that the bartender keeps refilling, try sitting at a table instead of the bar so you'll have to consciously get up and ask for a refill. Making the behavior a little more difficult or awkward to perform can be a great way to throw a wrench in the works.
Too often, we blame our failures on the wrong things. When it comes to ridding ourselves of bad habits, we usually chalk our difficulties up to a lack of commitment or willpower. But as I've argued in my new book "Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals," conquering your behavioral demons needs to start with understanding how they really work and applying the most effective strategy. In this case, success comes from not making it quite so easy for your autopilot to run the show.
For more on making lasting changes in your relationships, at work and everywhere else, check out my new book "Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals." Or, visit my website The Science of Success. Follow me on Twitter @hghalvorson.
Follow Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hghalvorson
Pavel Somov, Ph.D.: Understanding Emotional Eating
Carole Carson: Is Television Priming Us to Be Fat?
Cheryl Forberg, RD: Why We Eat When We're Not Hungry
Lilian Cheung, D.Sc., R.D.: Free Yourself of Unhealthy Habits
Mindful Eating, or Mindlessly Eating Better? | Psychology Today
How to Banish Bad Habits and Control Temptations — PsyBlog
Mindless Eating - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
4 Easy Ways to Prevent Mindless Eating - US News and World Report
5 Tips From 'Mindless Eating' - New York Times
Mindless Eating -- Food Psychologist Explains The Mindless Way ...
My wife was afraid that I was gonna get mouth and or tongue cancer...AND SO WAS I! so..one day I ran a google search to try and find a way to quit and much to my surprise..I found a site, bought the stuff...which was actually made of all herbs and all you do is mix a half of a tin/can of your regular tobacco to a full tin of this fake herb chew and do that for 2-3 weeks...
then just keep adding less and less until you are chewing nothing but this natural herb and after awhile you just lose interest in it all together and before ya know it you find yourself completely free of the horrible addiction...it wasn't easy! but it was necessary and I REALLY like having a lower jaw and tongue..if ya know what I mean.
just go visit an old age home .
And when is it our business to be concerned with the personal choices of others, they might not be the wisest, but are laws aimed at these choices for the protection of the Individual,
or for the bottom line of the insurance industry.
then you have to follow the thought ,
Do you want public law and policy to be made by your legislators for the beniefit of private investment groups?
If you think about it, in this economy, the smoker should be thanked. We're going to die long before we recoup the amount of social security we've paid in. Ditto with insurance premiums- yes, we're going to be in bad shape for a couple of years, but will still cost less than someone that lives to 90 having cardiac caths every couple years, on 12 different medications, and all the varying and sundry specialists they see. And add into that the huuuuuuuuuuuuge amount paid into the till via the tax on cigarettes. As broke as the government is now, imagine it without the millions per state that smoker's have been taxed into giving.
But I agree; the government does seem to pick and choose which individual rights they'll protect, and all things being equal, I suspect there are corporate interests at play in deciding which ones get protected.
We need to all 3 quit at the same time. I have had 5 strokes, and still didn't stop.
It is a very addictive drug, and hard to stop. HELP!
It is hard to quit if you live with smokers but it can be done. You have to put yourself and your health first and know that you deserve a better quality of life. Quitting sucks and is hard work and completely disrupts your life but as soon as I accepted this, it was easier for me. I made it my summer project and just went through it and it got easier and easier. Just believe that you can do it and stay strong! And check out the online support groups.
I confess, I was weak-willed. After smoking for 35 years, I had tried Chantix, hypnosis, 'groups', and gum, and failed them all. I tried the ecig (not that crappy subscription kind or the stuff at the mall- I found better and cheaper). I was able to quit smoking cigarettes within two weeks, quit nicotine within a couple months, and this past February stopped the ecig, too. Although God only knows what damage the ecig can do, I think using it as a temporary aid to stop smoking shouldn't pose any more danger than the cigarettes I would have smoked in that time period anyway. I suspect it was too little/too late as I don't feel magically better, but at least as they continue to hike the tax on a pack of cigarettes to pay for everything BUT anything that aids smokers, I'm spared paying the $7/pack.