Giving Up Something Sucks
I have been trying to eat healthily and reduce my social media usage for the past few weeks. And I realised that removing a habit seems super hard to me compared to adding a new one. I’ve been running and writing (this weekly newsletter & personal journaling) on a regular basis for the past 3 months. I also wrote a post about my experience of building these habits, but I consistently fail at removing something from my routine. I still don’t know how to overcome this but I’ve realised the reasons for this to happen.
Fucked up reward mechanism
I don’t have enough dopamine hits when I try to remove a bad habit. Whenever I finish my run or complete writing my newsletter, I feel good about it. There is a clear start and an end to the activity; which is not possible in removing a habit. When I’m trying to control my social media usage, the stress of not using it keeps building up over time and it’ll explode at some point. I don’t have any dopamine mechanism to help me keep going. After a point, I lose motivation and end up consuming more because people have built a world-class reward mechanism for you to keep consuming more stuff.
Dealing with emptiness
I’m left with an empty feeling of not doing something when I try to remove a habit. Dealing with emptiness is hard because my mind keeps going to the same activity over and over again. When I’m working late at night, I have the craving of ordering food from Swiggy. The craving doesn’t go away until I order something or do something about it. Simply avoiding the craving doesn’t work until I replace it with something else. Unless I have a very good replacement activity, it’s way harder to get rid of the existing one.
Most of the tools on the internet are focused on helping you build a new habit. This is great, but I haven’t seen as many tools that help you to remove a habit. Adding and removing habits are fundamentally different and I don’t see many tools that factor in these differences.
If you know of any app or website that helps you do this, please share it with me! I’m also looking to dive deeper into this to see if I can build something here. Cheers!