Why Willpower Never Kills A Bad Habit (And What Actually Does)

Key takeaways

•Every bad habit is an attempt to solve a problem. Your brain found something that works fast, and it kept using it.

•The habit is the solution, so the useful question is what problem it is solving. Ask that before you try to stop it.

•Booze, scrolling, gambling, shopping, food, porn and overwork are all doing the same job. Nobody is above this.

•Shame makes you hide the habit from yourself, and hidden behaviour cannot be studied or changed.

•Give yourself permission first. Sit down before you do the thing and ask what you actually need right now.

•BJ Fogg calls this untangling rather than breaking. Write out every specific version of the habit, then start with the easiest one.

•Bank the small wins. Success on the easy knots makes the hard ones possible later.

•Environment beats willpower. You have got an architecture problem, not a discipline problem.

Why Willpower Never Kills A Bad Habit (And What Actually Does)

Every bad habit is an attempt to solve a problem. Find the problem, and the habit starts to lose its grip.

Tuesday night in the Rebuild Room, someone asked the question that always comes up eventually. How do I break a bad habit?

It's not a new question. I've been asked it in the gym, over the phone, in DMs at eleven o'clock at night, and again a few weeks ago sitting down with Ash Butters for his podcast. It keeps surfacing because the honest answer is rarely the one people are hoping for.

Most of us go at a bad habit like it's a weed. Grab it, rip it out, stand back and admire the bare patch of dirt. Two weeks later it's back and it's thicker than before. Then comes the story. I'm weak. I've got no discipline. Other people must have something I don't.

I've told myself that story for decades, about a few different things. It's bullshit. And it's also the exact thing that keeps the habit alive.

Here's the line I keep coming back to, and the one I want you to sit with for a minute.

Every bad habit is an attempt to solve a problem.

Your brain worked out, at some point, that this thing takes the edge off. It filed that away as useful. Every time since then it's been running the same program, because the program works. Not well, and not for long, but it works fast, and fast is what the brain rewards.

James Clear says a version of this in Atomic Habits. All behaviour is driven by the desire to solve a problem, and your current habits are simply the methods you happened to learn rather than the best ones available. That second half is worth reading twice. You didn't choose your coping strategies off a menu. You stumbled into them, usually at a point in your life when you badly needed something to work.

What is your bad habit actually doing for you?

This is the question almost nobody asks, because asking it means admitting the habit is doing something for you. And that feels like weakness, or like letting yourself off the hook.

It's neither. It's information, and it's the most useful information you've got.

The glass of wine at six o'clock is doing a job. It might be marking the line between work and home, because nothing else in your day does that anymore. It might be softening the noise in the house. It might be the only ten minutes where nobody needs anything from you. It might be loneliness, or boredom, or the kind of low flat anger you'd never say out loud because there's nowhere to put it.

The scroll at eleven at night is doing a job too. It's giving you a tiny bit of joy after a day full of anything but! That's not a small job. That's a genuinely hard problem, and your phone solves it in under a second, every single time, for free.

Once you see the habit as a solution, the whole thing changes shape. You stop fighting yourself and you start looking at the problem sitting underneath it. The problem underneath is the bit you can actually do something about.

We all numb something

I want to be clear about the scope here, because it's easy to read a couple of paragraphs about wine and assume this is an article about drinking. It's not.

Booze. Weed. Scrolling. Porn. Online gambling, which is now something you can do on your phone during an ad break with money you don't have. The shopping app that gives you a little hit of anticipation in the afternoon and a parcel on your doorstep three days later. Food. Sugar. Caffeine, at the volume most of us are running it.

And then there's the socially approved one, the one nobody calls a bad habit, which is work. Staying late. Checking email in bed. Taking on the extra thing because you're the reliable one. Being busy is the most respectable way to avoid yourself that I know of, and it comes with a pay rise attached.

We've never had more ways to numb ourselves, and they've never been easier to reach. Most of them are free, instant, and built by people far smarter than us to be exactly that way. So let's drop the idea that using them makes you defective. Everyone in the Rebuild Room does some version of this. I do some version of this. The question worth asking is not whether you numb. Everyone numbs. The question is what you're numbing, and whether the thing you reach for takes you closer to where you want to be or further away.

Why does judgement keep you stuck?

Shame is a terrible coach. Loud, fast, and it produces nothing.

When you judge the habit, a few things happen at once. You start hiding it, first from other people and then from yourself. You stop looking directly at it, which means you can never study it properly. And you drag a whole pile of bad feeling into the room, which is exactly the state that sends you back to the habit in the first place. Shame makes you want a drink. Ask anyone.

I watched this play out for fifteen years with animals, long before I worked with people. You can't force a frightened animal to change. Push harder, punish the behaviour, and what you get is an animal that hides the behaviour from you. What works is patience, curiosity, and making the new thing easier than the old thing. Turns out we're not that different.

The moment you take judgement off the table, you can look at the thing straight. And you need to look at it straight, because you're about to go hunting for what it's really doing for you.

The question to ask before you pour the glass

Here's what I ask clients to do. Several of them are working through this right now with wine, which is why I keep using it as the example. You can insert your "thing" instead.

Step one. Give yourself permission.

You're allowed to have the glass of wine. I mean that. You're an adult and it's your life, and the second this becomes a rule you'll either break it and feel like garbage, or keep it and feel deprived. Neither one changes anything underneath. So the wine stays on the table. Nobody's taking it off you.

Step two. Sit down before you pour it.

Not while you're pouring. Before. Sit down with it in front of you and ask yourself three things. What am I actually needing right now? What problem am I trying to solve? Is there another way I could solve it?

Am I lonely? Am I bored? Am I angry? Am I wired and needing to come down, or flat and needing to come up? Am I hungry, which is the answer far more often than people expect? Do I need ten minutes where nobody talks to me? Do I need to ring someone?

Step three. Then do whatever you were going to do.

This is the part people trip over. You're not trying to talk yourself out of the wine. The job is to find out what the wine is for. Have it. The win here is the awareness, not the abstaining.

Do that for a week and something starts shifting on its own. You'll notice the same answer coming up again and again. You'll notice a particular hour of the day, or a particular kind of afternoon, that sets it off. And once or twice you'll catch yourself going and doing the other thing instead, because now you know what you actually wanted, and the wine was only ever the closest thing to hand.

What does the science say about breaking bad habits?

BJ Fogg, a behaviour scientist at Stanford and the author of Tiny Habits, won't use the phrase breaking a bad habit at all. He reckons the word breaking sets you up to fail, because it implies one big moment of force. You brace, you go hard, you snap the thing in half and it's done. Nothing about habit change works like that.

The word he uses instead is untangling. His image is a rope full of knots. Yank on both ends of a knotted rope and the knots pull tighter. What you actually do with a knotted rope is pick one knot, work it loose with your fingers, then move to the next one.

The mistake, Fogg says, is aiming at the general habit. Drink less. Get off my phone. Stop eating junk. They sound specific, but they're labels for a tangle of many different behaviours, and you can't untangle a whole rope at once.

So he has you write them all out. Every specific version of the thing. For drinking that might be the beer while you're cooking, the two glasses after the kids go to bed, the Friday knock-offs that turn into six, the round you order when you're out with mates, the bottle you buy on the way home after a rotten day. Get twenty of them down if you can. Be honest, and be specific.

Then here's the part that matters. You pick the easiest one to stop. Not the biggest. Not the one doing the most damage. The easiest.

Untangle that one. Redesign it so the old behaviour is harder and a replacement is easier, which nearly always means changing something in your environment rather than gritting your teeth harder. Then, and this sounds soft until you try it, make a point of noticing that you did it. Fogg is enormous on celebrating small wins, because feeling successful is what wires the new behaviour in.

Bank that win. Then go after the next easiest knot. The ones that look impossible today get a lot more possible once you've got three or four under your belt and you're no longer the bloke who can't do this.

Which brings me back to the thing I bang on about constantly. Environment beats willpower. You don't have a discipline problem, you've got an architecture problem, and architecture is something you can change on a Tuesday afternoon.

Self-compassion is not the soft option

People hear self-compassion and assume I'm telling them to go easy on themselves and call it personal growth. It's the opposite of that.

Being kind to yourself about the habit is the only thing that lets you look at it long enough to understand it. Judgement makes you flinch and look away. Curiosity keeps you in the room. And you have to stay in the room, because the answer is in there.

Some of what you find will be uncomfortable. Sometimes the problem the habit is solving turns out to be grief, or a relationship that's gone cold, or a job that's eating you alive, or something from a long way back that you've never properly dealt with. That's real, and that's the point where the habit stops being the story and you go and get proper help with the actual thing. No blog post is fixing that, mine included.

But most of the time, on most days, it's smaller than that. You're tired. You're touched out. You haven't eaten properly since breakfast. You haven't had ten minutes to yourself since Sunday. Once you know that, you've got options that aren't a bottle.

So start there this week. One habit. No judgement. Sit down before you do it and ask what problem you're trying to solve.

You might still do the thing. Doesn't matter. You'll know why you did it, and that's where all of this starts.

FAQ

Why is it so hard to break a bad habit?

Because you are trying to remove something that is doing a job for you. The habit solves a real problem, usually fast, which is why your brain keeps choosing it. Take it away without dealing with the problem underneath and you have just removed the only solution you had. That is why willpower runs out and the habit comes back thicker.

What does it mean that every bad habit is an attempt to solve a problem?

It means the behaviour is not random and you are not defective. At some point your brain learned that this thing takes the edge off loneliness, boredom, stress, anger or exhaustion, and it filed that away as useful. James Clear makes the same point in Atomic Habits. Your habits are the methods you happened to learn, not the best ones available.

How do I stop drinking a glass of wine every night?

Start by not stopping. Give yourself permission to have it, then sit down before you pour and ask three questions. What am I actually needing right now? What problem am I trying to solve? Is there another way to solve it? Then have the wine if you still want it. The win in the first week is the awareness, not the abstaining. Once you know what the wine is for, you have got other options.

Does self-compassion just let you off the hook?

No. Being kind to yourself about a habit is what lets you look at it long enough to understand it. Judgement makes you flinch and look away, and shame is the exact state that sends most people back to the habit. Curiosity keeps you in the room, and the answer is in the room.

What is BJ Fogg's untangling method?

Fogg refuses the phrase breaking a habit, because it implies one big moment of force. He uses untangling instead, with the image of a rope full of knots. Yank both ends and the knots tighten. Instead you list every specific version of the habit, pick the easiest one to stop, redesign your environment so the old behaviour is harder, and celebrate the win. Then go after the next easiest knot.

What if the problem underneath the habit is bigger than a habit?

Sometimes it is grief, or a relationship that has gone cold, or a job eating you alive, or something from a long way back. That is real, and that is the point where you stop working on the habit and go and get proper help with the actual thing. A blog post is not fixing that. A good therapist might.