Check out this answer from Consensus:
Breaking habits requires a multifaceted approach that includes motivation and incentives, specific planning (implementation intentions), environmental restructuring, and the formation of new habits. Digital interventions and professional support can also play significant roles in effectively disrupting unwanted habitual behaviors. Combining these strategies can lead to more successful and sustained habit change.
Breaking habits, especially those that are detrimental to health or well-being, is a significant challenge. Researchers have explored various methods to disrupt these automatic behaviors and restore goal-directed control. This synthesis examines the effectiveness of different strategies for breaking habits based on recent research findings.
Key Insights
- Motivation and Incentives:
- Combining performance feedback with monetary incentives can effectively disrupt well-established habits and restore goal-directed control1.
- Implementation Intentions:
- Formulating specific plans (implementation intentions) can help break unwanted habits, especially when combined with strategies that address the cues triggering the habitual behavior3.
- Environmental Restructuring:
- Disrupting environmental cues that trigger habitual behaviors is crucial. This can be achieved through interventions that either change the environment before habit performance or provide informational input during times of environmental change (e.g., moving houses, changing jobs)8.
- Habit-Based Interventions:
- Digital Interventions:
- Digital behavior change interventions, particularly those using pervasive computing technology, can support habit change by leveraging theories like Dual Process Theory and Goal Setting Theory to model and alter habitual behaviors7.
- Parental Strategies:
- In the context of children’s nonnutritive sucking habits, parents often use punitive measures to break these habits. However, professional advice is seldom sought, indicating a need for better public awareness and professional support10.
Are there methods to break habits?
Gina Cleo has answered Near Certain
An expert from Habit Change Institute in Habits, Behavioural Science, Health
Yes! Habits are malleable throughout our entire life and with enough motivation, self-regulation and persistence, can be modified, weakened or ‘broken’.
Habits are triggered by exposure to environmental cues which activate learned cue-routine associations. Breaking a habit therefore, requires inhibiting or avoiding these established cue-routine behavioural responses.
There are two widely known methods to ‘break’ a habit:
1 – Creating a counter-habitual implementation intention where we reprogram an alternative behavioural response when encountering the existing habit-trigger.
For example, if an individual is in the habit of drinking wine after work to unwind, they could replace the wine with an alternative behaviour that will still help them to unwind (e.g., a cup of herbal tea, hot shower, soft music, meditation, deep breathing, stretching, etc).
Another counter-habitual strategy includes ignoring the critical cue associated with the habitual response. For example, ‘when I crave sugar, I will ignore my urge to eat something sweet’.
These strategies create new cue-routine associations that directly compete with the existing habit; with consistency, the new responses have the potential to override and diminish the old habits.
It is worth noting that implementation intentions weaken the past cue-routine associations and reduce automaticity but are effective only when they are supported by strong goal-intentions or desires.
2 – Avoiding the environments that trigger the habit are an effective strategy to breaking habits. However, some environments are difficult to avoid, for example, if you are triggered to smoke a cigarette when you get to work, it may not be possible to avoid going to work. In cases where triggering environments are possible to avoid, this should be the preferred strategy for breaking habits as it can be easier compared with creating counter-habitual responses.
It should be noted that habits vary in strength on a continuum, so that they may be more or less habitual, or automatic. It is not entirely accurate to say a habit is ‘broken’, as it is more likely weaker in strength on the habit continuum.
Are there methods to break habits?
Miriam Sebold has answered Likely
An expert from Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Neuropsychology, Habits, Cognitive Science, Alcohol Use, Drug Use
In substance dependence there is a cognitive bias modification training that aims to reduce substance related habits by means of decreasing automatic approach tendencies towards substance cues (e.g. cigarette cues in nicotine dependence or alcohol cues in alcohol dependence). Individuals learn to push away these cues via a joystick but pull alternative stimuli (e.g. non substance related cues) towards them. Some studies have shown that this training reduces relapse in alcohol and nicotine dependence whereas others have failed to evidence long-lasting effects on abstinence. Thus future studies are warranted that elucidate the precise mechanisms that predict treatment efficacy of this training in substance dependence. More precisely, we need to find out which patients benefit most from this training, so we can further treat patients with this training that benefit most from it.
Beyond this training, cognitive behavioral therapies aim to reduce substance related habits by making patients aware of these processes. For instance, with regard to “cue-reactivity” (see 1.), patients need to learn which environmental cues elicit craving. Such cues are very different between individuals. Whereas some individuals report craving in social situations, others particularly crave when being lonely or sad. The identification of such “high risk situations” is one crucial step in therapy and will be followed by learning alternative and more healthy action strategies. For instance, if the high risk situation is feeling lonely, the substant dependent individual could learn to call a family member or friend whenever feeling socially isolated.