How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

 Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking.

The author employs an interesting strategy to help smokers eliminate their cravings. He systematically reframes each cue associated with smoking and gives it a new meaning.

He says things like: 

• You think you are quitting something, but you’re not quitting anything because cigarettes do nothing for you.
• You think smoking is something you need to do to be social, but it’s not. You can be social without smoking at all.
• You think smoking is about relieving stress, but it’s not. Smoking does not relieve your nerves, it destroys them.

By the time you get to the end of the book, smoking seems like the most ridiculous thing in the world to do. And if you no longer expect smoking to bring you any benefits, you have no reason to smoke. It is an inversion of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change: make it unattractive. 

WHERE CRAVINGS COME FROM

• Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive.
• Some of our underlying motives include:
• Conserve energy
• Obtain food and water
• Find love and reproduce
• Connect and bond with others
• Win social acceptance and approval
• Reduce uncertainty Achieve status and prestige

A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive.

Look at nearly any product that is habit-forming and you’ll see that it does not create a new motivation, but rather latches onto the underlying motives of human nature.

• Find love and reproduce = using Tinder 
• Connect and bond with others = browsing Facebook 
• Win social acceptance and approval = posting on Instagram 
• Reduce uncertainty = searching on Google 
• Achieve status and prestige = playing video games 

Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires. New versions of old vices. The underlying motives behind human behavior remain the same. The specific habits we perform differ based on the period of history.

Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it. 

Habits are all about associations. These associations determine whether we predict a habit to be worth repeating or not.

Every time you perceive a cue, your brain runs a simulation and makes a prediction about what to do in the next moment.

Cue: You notice that the stove is hot.
Prediction: If I touch it I’ll get burned, so I should avoid touching it.
Cue: You see that the traffic light turned green.
Prediction: If I step on the gas, I’ll make it safely through the intersection and get closer to my destination, so I should step on the gas.  

You see a cue, categorize it based on past experience, and determine the appropriate response.

 Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment.

The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. 

These predictions lead to feelings, which is how we typically describe a craving—a feeling, a desire, an urge. Feelings and emotions transform the cues we perceive and the predictions we make into a signal that we can apply. They help explain what we are currently sensing. For instance, whether or not you realize it, you are noticing how warm or cold you feel right now. If the temperature drops by one degree, you probably won’t do anything. If the temperature drops ten degrees, however, you’ll feel cold and put on another layer of clothing. Feeling cold was the signal that prompted you to act. You have been sensing the cues the entire time, but it is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action. 

A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state. This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act. 

Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different. 

Our feelings and emotions tell us whether to hold steady in our current state or to make a change.

Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings, and we can use this insight to our advantage rather than to our detriment.