How to Quit a Habit: A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking Habits
You can’t create successful behaviors and move forward in life without knowing how to quit a habit first. The bad ones that are so ingrained in you that they make you live in a comfort zone need to be removed once and for all.
We should first get rid of the obstacles – in this case, the bad habits – before we move onto building better ones.
It’s not an easy task, but it’s absolutely possible and becomes simple once you understand how habits work.
The thing is, you can’t really do anything about that if you don’t know how habits are formed and broken.
There are psychology and science behind all that and it’s a process that happens on the inside before the results can be seen in reality.
How Habit-Forming and Breaking Work?
Habit-forming is the process of starting a new behavior (hopefully on purpose) and sticking to it long enough so that we soon do it on autopilot, and can move onto developing the next successful habit on our list.
Quitting habits
Understanding the cues and rewards of habits.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg is one of the best books in the niche.
He describes the habit-forming and habit-changing process like no one else does, and thus makes things easier to implement for the average person.
The main theory of the book is about the habit loop. According to it, there’s a neurological loop at the core of every habit and it’s quite simple.
It consists of 3 elements – a cue, a routine and a reward. Understanding each is crucial if we want to hack the process:
- cue – what triggers the behavior;
- routine – the behavior itself;
- reward – what you get after doing the habit (usually instant gratification or other emotional sense of comfort when talking about bad habits).
How to Quit a Habit: The Process
1. Define the bad habit you’ll try to break.
2. Focus on just starting and start super small.
Like everyone else, I’ve also been trying to change my habits for years, and have often failed.
I tried to change my diet and start eating clean from day one. I wanted to be able to write every day, to go to the gym 5 times a week, learn a foreign language in a short time, and so on. And none of these attempts were successful (at least not in the beginning).
Soon I realized where my mistake was – I always tried to make big changes.
How to start small?
Simply make it so easy to quit the habit that you won’t be able to say no.
Want to start eating healthier? Do it by adding just one fruit or vegetable to your menu.
To stop going to bed so late? Avoid using any devices an hour before bedtime, then move your dinner to an earlier hour and make it lighter.
What about quitting smoking? Let’s smoke 1 cigarette less a day.
Or letting go of negative thinking? Start by substituting one negative thought a day with a positive one.
No one said it should be difficult, with a lot of effort and sweat.
Yes, it will take time and persistence, but building and breaking habits can be easy and simple at the same time.
3. Choose incremental change.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind when learning how to quit a habit.
Often people underestimate small changes, steps, achievements or else, just because of their size. But when combined, they transform our whole life in the long-term.
Avoiding sweets just for this one meal may not seem like a big thing to you. But do it many times, and you can lose weight and fix your eating habits without even realizing.
That’s the power of incremental change.
4. Rely on short-term motivation.
I’ve recently realized that long-term vision is much needed to have a direction in life, but it’s short-term motivation that will keep us going.
We basically need to constantly trick our minds into going after a certain change in life, so that we can ignore the distractions on the way and get closer to it slowly, but steadily.
That’s not a bad thing, of course. But it’s important to know it so that we can see results.
So how do we stay motivated in the short-term when breaking habits? Well, it’s easier than looking at the big picture.
- stay present;
- listen to music;
- learn new skills;
- focus on what you have;
- do things more slowly to find joy;
- read inspirational quotes;
- surround yourself with like-minded people;
and so on.
Related: Where to Get Motivation When You Are Absolutely Exhausted
5. Daily commitment.
The only ones that get what they want are those who get up every day and commit to the changes they want to make.
Even if it’s one action, or 1 hour of concentrated work, or saying no to one thing they’re trying to avoid.
It’s consistency that creates results.
During the journey you grow and learn, build character and become stronger. In time, it gets much easier.
In fact, you soon start doing it on autopilot, see improvement and your dream lifestyle starts to look more real.
That’s your motivation to keep going. Because no matter what, you need to move forward in order to find out how to quit a habit.
No matter how many other things you need to get done, how bad you feel, or how many unpredicted things come up, you need to commit to changing your habits and take your daily step.

6. Change your environment.
Here are 2 more specific ways to improve your environment so that you can break bad habits:
- Don’t communicate often with people who have a bad influence on you and with whom you connect the bad habit.
A person who’s overcome drug addiction, for instance, should never spend time with his old friends who are still using. No doubt about that.
But that applies to simpler and more common situations in daily life too. If you’ve finally become more confident, you shouldn’t go back to the environment or people who make you feel inferior and doubt your abilities.
- Make it a priority.
Some of the things you do daily, whether you’ve turned them into successful habits or not, are more important than others. Maybe they help you make a living, or bring you happiness and a sense of control, or give you instant gratification.
Whatever that is, you need to keep doing them no matter what. The best way is to put them on the top of your to-do list.
7. Preventing failure.
![How to Quit a Habit: A Beginner's Guide to Breaking Habits 3 How to Make Your First Money Online Freelancing [Free Course] by lidiya k letsreachsuccess.com teachable](https://letsreachsuccess.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/new-free-online-course-1024x682.jpeg)
- Plan in advance.
Preparation is key if you’re aiming for at least 70-80% success rate (perfection isn’t a realistic target when it comes to knowing how to quit a habit).
- Have a fixed time for everything.
That makes life so much easier and more organized.
Your performance increases and you just don’t need to think about time anymore, as everything will have a set hour throughout the day and you’ll just follow the plan.
8. Tracking progress.
I remember that the more I was reading about successful people’s daily routines, habits and little tips on how to be more productive, the more I was noticing a tendency there.
They were all measuring their results one way or another.
Then, I started making more detailed descriptions of different stuff I was doing daily.
The written word is more powerful indeed. And knowing how much time something took you and the chance to compare it to the previous and the next few times you do it is priceless.
Nothing can give you such great feedback about your performance. As a result, you can decide what changes you want to make in order to see an improvement. And then track that too.
So add that to your decision to learn how to quit a habit.
Use an app, have a separate notebook, or just open a new Word document and start writing something daily connected to what you do or don’t do about the habit.
Include how you feel about it all the time. Also, other unusual things you do during that day, as each may affect how you perform or how much willpower you’ve got left to use for the habit.
25 Habit Quotes to Inspire You
1. Habits are safer than rules; you don’t have to watch them. And you don’t have to keep them, either. They keep you. ~ Frank Crane
2. Good habits formed at youth make all the difference. ~ Aristotle
3. A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit. ~ Desiderius Erasmus
4. The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. ~ Samuel Johnson
5. The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half. ~ Feodor Dostoevski
6.Quality is not an act, it is a habit. ~ Aristotle
7. Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. ~ Jim Ryun
8. Good habits are worth being fanatical about. ~ John Irving
9. Powerful indeed is the empire of habit. ~ Publilius Syrus
10. A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time. ~ Mark Twain
11. Bad habits are easier to abandon today than tomorrow. ~ Yiddish Proverb
12. The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones. ~ Somerset Maugham
13. Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. ~ Warren Buffett
14. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. ~ Vince Lombardi
15. Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them. ~ Confucius
16. Habit is a cable; we weave a thread each day, and at last we cannot break it. ~ Horace Mann
17. Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims. ~ Carlos Santana
18. Small habits well pursued betimes
May reach the dignity of crimes. ~ Hannah More
19. The people you surround yourself with influence your behaviors, so choose friends who have healthy habits. ~ Dan Buettner
20. It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them. ~ Benjamin Franklin
21. Habit is a man’s sole comfort. We dislike doing without even unpleasant things to which we have become accustomed. ~ Goethe
22. The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it. ~ Leo Aikman
23. Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all. ~ Georges Gurdjieff
24. In one sense the whole process of development consists of the formation of habits; for knowledge itself, and the powers of thought, as well as the higher elements in the will, all depend upon the establishment of fixed ways of reacting to given stimuli. ~ Edward O. Sisson
25. The secret of the whole matter is that a habit is not the mere tendency to repeat a certain act, nor is it established by the mere repetition of the act. Habit is a fixed tendency to react or respond in a certain way to a given stimulus; and the formation of habit always involves the two elements, the stimulus and the response or reaction. The indolent lad goes to school not in response to any stimulus in the school itself, but to the pressure of his father’s will; when that stimulus is absent, the reaction as a matter of course does not occur. ~ Edward O. Sisson
Are you ready to start quitting bad habits?
Breaking habits is a process that can help us be free from the prison of the old behaviors and the comfort zone we’re used to, and finally getting the chance to build better, successful habits instead.
If you can’t really achieve anything big in your life, don’t see any transformations in your behavior and mindset, and don’t seem to be getting closer to your goals, then let me tell you a little about the pillar of personal growth.
It’s all about habits.
Breaking bad habits, replacing them with good ones, learning how to make them stick, and gradually turning the things you do daily into something productive, positive, healthy and successful.
This can be considered the secret success formula you’ve been looking for. But that doesn’t mean it offers a shortcut. No.
Habits are hard to be built, and old ones are even harder to be changed. But it’s a process that can be learned. Once you do it right, you’ll just replicate it every next new behavior you’re trying to develop.
That’s how to quit a habit and move on with your life. Any other helpful tips?