How to break a bad habit: what the research says works

To break a bad habit, change the situation that sets it off instead of relying on willpower. Hide or remove the cue, put friction in front of the first step, and decide in advance what you will do when the cue shows up anyway. Habits run on their setting, so the setting is where they are weakest.

That is what the research on ordinary habits says, and it is what worked for me with pornography. A compulsive habit needs one more thing that most habit books leave out, and I will come to it at the end.

Why willpower is the wrong tool#

A habit is not a decision you keep making. It is a response your surroundings set off. Wendy Wood, a psychologist who has studied habits for decades, finds that about 43 percent of what people do each day is repeated in the same context, usually while they are thinking about something else. In her early diary studies, people in the middle of their most habitual actions were usually thinking about something unrelated to what they were doing. The behavior was running without them.

The clearest demonstration is a study about popcorn. People with a strong habit of eating popcorn at the cinema ate as much stale popcorn as fresh, as if taste did not matter. Taste mattered again outside the cinema, and it mattered again when they had to eat with their other hand. The habit did not follow what they liked. It followed where they were and what their hand usually did.

Change the setting and habits loosen on their own. Students who moved to a new university kept their old exercise, newspaper and television habits only where something of the old setting came with them. Where a habit broke, what they did began, in some cases, to follow what they intended.

Self-control research points the same way. A review by Angela Duckworth, Tamar Gendler and James Gross argued that because impulses grow stronger as they develop, changing your situation before one forms may be especially effective: the partygoer who sits far from where the drinks are poured, the student who goes to the library without a phone. And in a week-long study of everyday desires, the people with the most self-control reported fewer conflicts between what they wanted and what they meant to do: fewer temptations, so fewer moments that needed willpower at all.

Willpower is real. It is the last line of defense, and my habit came when that line was thinnest: late, tired, alone.

Turn the four laws around#

James Clear's Atomic Habits builds a habit by making it obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. To break one, he turns each around: make it invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying. Applied to pornography, it looks like this.

Invisible. The phone charges outside the bedroom. The laptop lives at a desk. The apps and bookmarks that led there are gone. Moving the phone out of the bedroom removed more of my cues than everything else combined, and lesson five is built around that one move.

Unattractive. Write down, in one line, what the habit actually costs you, and read it every morning. A cost you have named is harder to forget at eleven at night.

Difficult. Wood calls this friction, and it works because a habit follows the easiest path. A filter on every device, with the unlock code held by someone else, turns the first step from easy to annoying. The blockers page shows how, device by device.

Unsatisfying. The habit depends on secrecy. Telling one person you trust takes the secrecy away, and some of the pull goes with it.

Decide what you will do when the cue comes#

Some cues cannot be removed: tiredness, boredom, loneliness, a hard day. For those, a well-tested tool is a plan written as "if this happens, then I will do that". Psychologists call it an implementation intention. A meta-analysis by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 independent tests and found a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals, including on shielding a goal from unwanted influences.

Two findings matter when you use these plans against a habit.

Write the replacement, not the refusal. In studies of snacking habits, plans of the form "if this, then I will not" backfired: they strengthened the very link they were meant to break, most of all when the habit was strong. Plans that named something else to do did not. So not "if I am in bed at eleven, I will not look at it", but "if I am in bed at eleven, the phone goes to the kitchen and I read".

Expect a plan alone to lose to a strong habit. In a field study with smokers, if-then plans cut smoking for people with weak or moderate habits, but not for those with the strongest ones. That is the honest limit of every technique on this page, and it is why none of them is meant to work alone.

Applying it to pornography: start at the cue#

Every compulsive habit runs on the same four beats: a cue, an urge, a ritual and relief. The instinct is to fight at the urge, when the pull is strongest, which is the worst place to stand. The loop walks through the beats in full. The order of work follows from them.

Remove the cues you can. The phone in bed, the late hours alone, the laptop on the sofa at midnight.

Catch the inside cues you cannot remove. Mine were never sexual. They were states I wanted to leave: tiredness, boredom, loneliness, stress. Notice them early and answer the feeling itself. Go to bed. Call someone. Go for a walk.

Step off at the ritual. The small moves between the urge and the act, the door, the tab, the search, are the last good place to stop.

Let an urge that still gets through pass. Watch it rise and fall without acting on it. Willpower is the backup to all of this, not the plan.

Where the habit books stop#

Most of the habit research above is about ordinary habits: snacking, exercise, the newspaper. For those, easing a habit down is a reasonable goal. A compulsive habit is different, because cutting down keeps the supply, and the supply keeps the drift toward more.

The idea I found missing from the habit books is one Allen Carr built his whole approach to smoking on: you stop at once and completely, and stopping is not giving something up. His argument, which matched my experience, is that what the habit offers is mostly relief from the craving it created itself. Seen clearly, there is nothing to miss, so there is nothing to taper.

There is some evidence for the stopping-at-once part, from smoking. In a randomized trial of 697 smokers, 49.0 percent of those who quit abruptly were abstinent at four weeks, against 39.2 percent of those who cut down first. At six months it was 22.0 against 15.5 percent, and quitting abruptly came out ahead even for people who had said they would rather cut down. Smoking is not pornography, but the shape of the finding is the shape of what worked for me.

So the techniques make stopping possible, and the decision makes it final. Change the setting, and decide once.

Questions people ask#

Is it better to replace a bad habit or just stop it?#

Both, in that order. Stop the habit, and have a replacement ready for each cue you cannot remove, written as a plan that names what you will do rather than what you will not. What to do instead matches replacements to the feelings that usually start it.

Why do I keep doing something I no longer enjoy?#

Because a strong habit does not check whether you enjoy it. It answers the setting, the way the cinema-goers kept eating stale popcorn. That is good news: changing the setting works even while you still feel the pull.

How long does it take to break a habit?#

That question deserves its own page. How long it takes covers what the research does and does not show, where the famous 21 days came from, and why I ask for thirty days instead of promising a number.

What if I slip?#

A slip is one event, not a verdict. Write down the cue that came before it, put the phone back outside the room, and carry on the same day. The cue is the useful part; it tells you what to remove next.

If you want to test all of this on yourself rather than take my word for it, the thirty days is the plan: decide once, stop completely, change the setting, and judge the difference from your own evidence on day thirty.