Good Habits (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)

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How to Break Up with Your Bad Habits

By Jud Brewer

Breaking habits is hard. We all know this, whether we’ve failed our latest diet (again) or felt the pull to refresh our Instagram feed instead of making progress on a work project that is past due. This is largely because we are constantly barraged by stimuli engineered to make us crave and consume, stimuli that hijack the reward-based learning system in our brains designed initially for survival.

Put simply, reward-based learning involves a trigger (for example, the feeling of hunger), followed by a behavior (eating food) and a reward (feeling sated). We want to do more of the things that feel good and less of the things that feel bad—or stressful. These three components (trigger, behavior, ...