Assignment 8

Breaking Bad Habits – Step 3: Disrupt The Old Behaviour

Change at its essence comes down to stopping doing one thing and starting to do something
else.

For example:

• Stop sleeping in. Start getting up on time.

• Stop surfing aimlessly on the web. Start being more productive.
• Stop putting yourself down. Start talking yourself up.
• Stop over thinking. Start trusting your gut.
• Stop delaying making decisions. Start deciding and quickly acting on it.
• Stop acting shy. Start acting confidently.

Step 3 in our habit busing process is you must disrupt the old behavior.

As you learned on Hack 5 ‘Truths & Myths’, your brain doesn’t label things as “good habits” or
“bad habits”. They are all just habits. Our brain will follow and create habits on the basis of
what we do, not what we think about doing, not about what we think we should do, not on
what we say we would like to do, but only on what we actually do. What we repeatedly do we
get good at and what you practice you WILL get more of.

So the doorway between stopping doing one habit and starting doing another is to somehow
disrupt, interrupt, get in-between, the trigger and the habituated response or pattern.

The good news is there are many ways to do this, when we have:

1. Built a strong intention

2. Brought awareness to how the trigger and habit response operate

So if you haven’t yet done exercises 6 and 7, please do these now before turning to the next
page.

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 Assignment 8

The Robot likes things to be predictable. It likes things to run with consistency and dislikes
anything that gets in the way of doing what it has habituated as its “normal” behaviour.

We can use this to help entrain a new pattern when we understand that any pattern that is
consistently disrupted will change and any pattern that is repeated will grow stronger.

Therefore our goal is to disrupt the our old response long enough to redirect it down a new
pattern of behavior and then repeat that pattern enough times for the robot to habituate to the
new response.

As you have learned previously, the brain is event-driven. Almost nothing occurs before an
event first happens, for example, you suddenly feel hungry which triggers the response “find
food!”

The triggers, which can take the form of sights, sounds, smell, taste or touch, are what SIGNAL
the Robot to execute whichever response we have most habituated to. So when we want to
disrupt the old behavior we can

1. Leverage what already works

2. Target the least variable part of the pattern
3. Go before the trigger
4. Change the context
5. Change the environment
6. Change the doing of the behaviour

We cover each in more detail on the next page.

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 Assignment 8

The Big Six Disruption Patterns

#1 Leverage What Already Works

There are many contexts where you have habituated to doing something else, rather than
doing the default habit. That is to say there are existing contexts where your default habit
doesn’t trigger.

To identify these ask:

• When, where and under what circumstances or conditions does my default habit
NOT occur as it normally would?

For our “watching TV till 1AM” habit, some examples include:

• Whenever the person didn’t feel stressed by the day

• Anytime she has visitors over
• Whenever she eats dinner in the kitchen while listening to music
• When the cable provider TV feed and Internet is broken

#2: Target The Least Variable Part:

Another excellent way to disrupt a bad habit is to target the least variable part of the pattern.

Ask yourself:

• What is always present whenever that pattern occurs?

Then focus on changing the part(s) of the pattern that is most consistent. This can radically
impact the Robot’s ability to perform the habit.

For our “watching TV till 1AM” habit, there are 4 things that are always present when the
behavior occurs.

• Feeling of stress in the body

• Blank TV screen
• Sitting down in comfy chair in the sitting room
• Eating “carb heavy” meal
• ‘Persuasive’ internal dialogue; “I wonder what new shows are on?”

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 Assignment 8

So as disruptions we could:

• Introduce an activity that removes or reduces the feeling of stress before person eats
• Remove the TV entirely from the sitting room
• Remove the seat from the sitting room
• Eat in a different room with no TV
• Change the meals so they are no longer carb heavy
• Modify the internal dialogue so it redirects to a different choice…

#3 Go Before The Trigger

Since the trigger is what tells the Robot to begin, if we go before the trigger and set up a
different action path, we can prevent the old trigger from firing and thereby block the habit
from running altogether.

• For example “feeling stressed” and “sitting down in comfy chair in the sitting room” are
triggers that when present act as a signal for our example Habit Hacker’s Robot to kick
in with the response being to “veg out in front of the TV” to seek relief.
• Since the person knows “every time I got in to the sitting room and feel stressed I turn
on the TV and veg out”, we can insert a new pattern to run BEFORE they walk in to the
sitting room.
• For example, the new program would go like this “Anytime I feel stressed from my day I
go to my bedroom and do ten minutes of mindful breath meditation where I actively
focus on releasing all excess stress from my body before I sit down to eat.”
• Or “Anytime I feel stressed from my day I go for a walk for ten minutes and actively
enjoy being in nature before I sit down to eat.”
• Etc.

There are countless alternative action paths that could be introduced to occur before the TV
triggers. Which disruption will be most effective will depend on the person and context.

How can you disrupt your triggers from firing?

Experiment to find out what works best for you.

#4: Change The Context

Context plays a key role in how we behave. When you change the context, the behavior
frequently changes as well.

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 Assignment 8

In our example TV watching case, the person is always is sitting down (context) when watching
TV for hours. If we wanted to disrupt that you could suggest they watch as much TV as they
want, but must be standing up the entire time they do so. This will radically disrupt the default
pattern of sitting down and going unconscious and reintroduce conscious process “Do I really
want to watch this?”

Context also refers to WHO is around you when you do your habit. For example one client
would only smoke when they were out with friends who smoked. The rest of the time she
never smoked. By NOT going outside the restaurant/bar when her smoking friend wanted a
cigarette she stopped smoking overnight.

Look for ways you can modify the who, where and when of the situation.

#5: Change The Environment

Environment also plays an important role in behavior. Change the environment and you
change your life.

If you’re trying to break a habit, look for ways to change the environment in which the habit
occurs. For example, a woman who experienced an overeating problem, realized part of her
pattern was keeping her fridge full with high fat, high sugar foods. They were conveniently
placed at eye level and were the first things she saw when she opened the fridge door.

By changing how she stored food in to her fridge, so the high fat, high sugar foods were kept in
drawers out of sight at the back, and the healthier options were the first thing she saw helped
break her over eating habit.

Another change to her environment I suggested was eat her main mails using a smaller plate
size. Researches discovered that by reducing your plate size, for example from twelve-inch to
ten-inch plates, typically results in people eating as much as 22% less food. It works in part
because people tend to eat visually, and not attend to the feelings that tell them they are full.

As a result of these two changes she experienced a drastic reduction in over eating and quickly
started losing weight without needing to diet.

What can you change about your environment that will disrupt your bad habit?

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 Assignment 8

#6: Change The Physical Doing

There are many ways to mess up a well established habit. One of our favourites is to change
how you do the habit.

You could…

• Practice intentionally doing the habit while asking yourself “Is this the best I can do for
meeting [desired goal/outcome the habit is seeking]?”

• Break up the habit in to distinct parts and do each separately while intentionally
extending the duration.

For our TV example this would look like:

1. Sit in the arm-chair for 30 minutes while doing nothing else.

2. Try 200 times to pick up the TV remote but each time stop short of actually doing so.
3. Stair at the blank screen on the TV for 1 hour before turning it on.
4. Ask a new question “what else could I do with my time this evening, that I would
enjoy doing?”
5. Start watching TV for 5 minutes, then stand up. Turn off the TV and walk away.
Repeat 50 times.

The goal is to introduce conscious choice about our behavior and to get so BORED with
doing the same pattern that the Robot goes “OK, I’ve had enough!”

• Change the order in which you do the habit so the habit can’t operate its normal way.

• Change the duration you do the habit for. For our TV example this would be watch as
much TV as you want in 15 minute chunks with a minimum of 30 minutes between each
TV watching session.

• Link the habit to another activity that is arduous to do. For example watch as many
Netflix episodes as you want but do 30 burpees, squats or press-ups between each
episode or some other equivalent activity that is burdensome to do.

The general rule of thumb is pay attention to how the pattern is disrupted and do more those
disrupters that work. For more tips check out William O’Hanlan’s excellent book “Do One
Thing Different.”

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 Assignment 8

We covered the six power patterns for disrupting the old habit.

Action:

• Review how the habit you are committed to changing operates. Look for ways to
interrupt and disrupt the old pattern from operating.
• Create a plan of action for how you are going to disrupt the old behavior, write it
down.
• Start disrupting the old behavior today!

© 2016, All rights reserved. D&T New Media Ltd.