I’ve been experimenting with discouraging myself from impulsive negative habits, too. (Skin-picking and nail-biting, which I think was a topic a while back?)
I’m finding that a “do more” mentality works better for me than a “do less” approach. So right now I’ve been experimenting with giving myself “happy hand” points for each discrete time chunk I can resist the bad habit. Say, one point for every quarter-hour that I didn’t pick. And on the flip side, a negative point for each nail-pick within the given quarter hour. Then I set a reasonable “do more” goal, and try to track throughout my work day.
No picks from 10:30 - 10:45? 1 point! One pick? 0 points. Two picks? -1 points. And so on. The nice thing is that I can always get a positive tally for the day, as long as I keep the awareness up long enough.
I found this approach to work for me for a few reasons:
- It builds intentionality, because I set out ahead of time to resist the habit for a small chunk of time, rather than just catching myself after the fact.
- Rewarding positive actions – I get the reward of logging a nice little happy point every 15 minutes, instead of potentially dreading having to log failures.
- It’s bite-size. Theoretically, I can do anything for 15 minutes if I put my mind to it. A whole day? Not so much.
- I get to reset things right away. Even if I have a ridiculously bad quarter-hour and end up in a negative zone, I get to start fresh immediately with the new chunk of time and pull myself out of the hole, rather than racking up failures that just haunt me throughout the day.
- Awareness – Since the possibility of success is always around the corner, I end up logging even the negative points more honestly – and, as noted above, it’s really the awareness and reflection that helps to break the habit. So I put little comments in next to the negative points to remind myself what the trigger was.
Been doing this for a few months now. We’ll see how it goes.