We all have bad habits that affect different areas of our life, that we know we need to stop doing, yet we just can't seem to manage it.
I want you to think of 1 particular bad habit you have that is currently holding you back from making further progress.
Looking at it from a nutritional side, examples might be; Having a drink or two each evening when getting in from work... Snacking whilst working or at night time... Ordering takeaways instead of cooking your own meal... Going to the vending machines or local shop at lunchtime to get a chocolate bar...
So how do you break these bad habits?
One of the law's of habits, is to make doing the action difficult. Increasing the amount of friction between you and the bad habit, increasing the number of small things you have to do in order to complete it.
Using my first example; Having a drink in the evening's after work...
This bad habit is easy to do if your alcoholic beverage is always visible and readily accessible to immediately pick up and drink. You only have to do 1 thing - pick it up, or maybe 2 things if your opening the fridge.
So let's look at what we could do to increase the friction here and make it more difficult to complete...
The most obvious one would be to not keep alcoholic drinks in the house, as then you would have to go out to the shops to get some, and that's effort.
But let's say there is some in the house, because that's more realistic. You could not keep beers in the fridge and keep them in their packaging/a box out of sight. That way you then have to put them in the fridge and wait for them to chill before drinking one (because who likes warm beer right?), which increases the friction.
To take this a step further, and basing on something I have seen used with phones, you could place a commitment task on it. So for example take a puzzle book, such as Sudoku, taking one of the pages out and sticking to the top of the beer box/bottle beer/bottle of wine/bottle of spirit, and when you go to get it, you have to complete the task before you get to have it.
This would add an extra step of friction to make accessibility harder, and it could also make you think twice before carrying out your bad habit.
These are just examples, and of course can be applied to anything else in your life, and the tactics you use would have to work for you.
Have a think and see if you can reduce or eliminate a bad habit.
Hope this helps you in some way
