Almost every single client I’ve worked with has dealt with this problem — They keep trying to change, but each attempt ends either in complete failure OR in a simple switch to a new bad habit or addiction.
This has been true thousands of times… and in a country where over 100 million people struggle with addiction and compulsive habits, it is a massive cause of pain, suffering, and even death.
Why?
The Wrong Approach Can Sabotage Your Efforts
Most behavior change approaches focus solely on stopping the behavior
Source: Adi Jaffe
Breaking a habit is hard work, but what if your efforts to eliminate a bad habit are actually making it stronger? Many people focus solely on stopping the behavior, thinking that if they can just quit, the problem will go away. However, this approach often overlooks the underlying forces that drive the habit in the first place. By ignoring these factors, we not only miss the opportunity to change, but may actually further reinforce the habit we’re trying to change.
Unfortunately, the primary approach to behavioral change is to focus fully on stopping the troubling behavior, an effort that most often fails.
In this post, we’ll explore why simply eliminating a behavior can backfire, leading you to either double down on the old habit or replace it with a new, potentially worse one.
The Danger of Focusing Only on Behavior
Many people believe that the key to breaking a habit is to simply stop doing it. Whether it’s smoking, overeating, endless scrolling, or compulsive shopping, the idea is that if you can just stop the behavior, you’ll be free from its grip. However, this approach is often too simplistic.
Why? This is because the behavior itself is often just the tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath are the deeper triggers, emotions, and needs that drive the habit. For example, if you go online shopping when stressed, to distract yourself and feel less burdened by anxiety, stopping yourself from shopping online will not resolve your anxiety. In fact, it will likely only leave you feeling even less able to manage your anxious feelings. By focusing solely on stopping the behavior, you ignore your crippling anxiety and therefore leave yourself vulnerable. This can lead to a rebound effect, where the desire for the behavior becomes even more potent. Left without your “anxiety fix,” you may find another coping behavior — drinking, social media surfing, taking pills, or anything else — or you may simply run back to the one you’e been trying to change.
These cycles, repeated over time, leave many feeling hopeless, ashamed, and broken, believing they are trapped. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Understanding the Drivers Behind Your Habits
To truly break a habit, it’s crucial to understand what’s driving it. These drivers can be emotional, psychological, or environmental. For example, stress might be a key trigger for your smoking, while loneliness could drive your overeating. In my upcoming book Unhooked, I share my tools for understanding and addressing the true factors that drive our bad habits. After working with thousands, I can tell you that while it is more demanding than trying to “simply stop,” it is also more effective and makes it endlessly easier to free ourselves of them.
Here’s why: Addressing the underlying factors (I call them hooks in the book) allows you not only to experience relief from your desire to engage in your unhealthy habits but to improve the overall quality of your life as well.
In the book, I tell the story of a client who felt helpless when it came to slowing down or stopping her drinking. No matter what she tried, the classic tale of either switching alcohol varieties or moving on to different drugs (it was opiate and benzodiazepine pills for her) continued on for years. Through our work, the reality of her very challenged marriage emerged as a primary factor, along with the fact that she had let go of her career when she had children. Our focus became to solve these issues, and not the drinking.
With her focus realigned, my client was more driven to create change. Before, she hadn’t been very motivated to stop drinking in the first place. She simply agreed to it because she saw no other options. But when clients get to focus on the actual pains in their lives, something changes: They become more driven, more committed, and more successful.
The Rebound Effect: Why Habits Come Back Stronger
When you try to suppress a behavior without dealing with its root causes, you create internal tension. This tension can build up until it bursts, often leading to a rebound effect where the habit returns stronger than before. Without your “medicine,” the need for relief becomes stronger than ever, especially because you aren’t practiced in addressing this discomfort without the help of your elixir. Again, if stress is causing you to overeat and you try to simply stop eating comfort foods, the stress doesn’t go away. In fact, it may intensify, leading you to crave even more comfort food in the long run. When you give into eating, you feel more hopeless and resigned to being “addicted.”
In the book, I talk about approaches that focus on the opportunity this tension provides to find alternative behaviors that can still resolve your needs, but without the costs and problems associated with the bad habit.
A Better Approach: The EAT Cycle
Instead of focusing solely on stopping the behavior, a more effective approach is to use the EAT cycle: Explore, Accept, Transform (see figure below). This method involves exploring the underlying factors driving the habit, reducing judgment of these factors, and then transforming the behavior based on the learnings.
The exploration component allows you to uncover hidden, unnoticed, or simply ignored factors that contributed to the negative outcome. The acceptance component allows you to practice self-compassion regarding the important role of deeply meaningful root causes in impacting your present behavior. Many of us feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, or angry that experiences from our past are still affecting us now, even years or decades later. Finally, the transformation component allows you to seek out effective new tools, practices, and habits, to replace the old ones — but this time from a compassionate and well informed place (instead of simply an avoidant or non-integrated one). During transformation, you practice adjusting your behavior and making small, manageable changes. This is how you can create lasting change without the risk of the rebound effect or substitution.
The EAT process from the upcoming book – Unhooked
Source: Adi Jaffe
Proactive Substitution: Trading Bad Habits for Good
As suggested, in order to successfully break a compulsive or addictive habit, you need to recognize the tension, identify the source, and then find a replacement behavior. If you walk into this process prepared, you can become proactively engaged in finding good alternatives, instead of being reactive and seeking something quick to rid you of the discomfort you’re being flooded with.
The difference is substantial, but it involves preparation and diligence. You have to practice potential alternatives during periods of low stress in order to be prepared to use them when the tension begins mounting. Unfortunately, most people aren’t interested in putting in the work when they’re not feeling activated or stressed. That’s why, for instance, someone who is trying to stop smoking might find themselves overeating instead when they experience high stress. Both behaviors might serve as a way to cope with stress or anxiety, and no potential alternative has been made readily available. If a great replacement isn’t available, the person will likely continue to seek out new behaviors to fill the void.
Conclusion
Breaking a habit is not just about stopping the behavior; it’s about understanding and addressing the deeper drivers behind it. If you only focus on eliminating the behavior, you might find that your habit comes back stronger or is replaced by another. By using a method like the EAT cycle, you can explore, accept, and transform your habits in a way that leads to lasting change. So next time you’re tempted to quit something cold turkey, remember that addressing the root causes might just be the key to breaking your worst habits for good.
