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How to Break Any Bad Habit
The most common question I get as a coach is:
Can you teach me how to
break a bad habit?
It’s usually someone who has waited until
everyone has left the room or they reach out
privately over email. Let me clear the air --
everyone has bad habits. They may look a little
different. But we all have them. They’re one of
the biggest things that hold us back from
achieving our goals -- and yet, no one wants to
talk about them. Well, it’s time for us to start
talking. Enough areas of brain science have
come together over the last few years to create
a rock-solid strategy for annihilating bad habits.
I’ve spent the last 22 years studying the brain
and have really tried to listen to people’s lived
experience and dial in on the problems that are
frustratingly persistent. Bad habits are exactly
that kind of pull-your-hair-out-problem that
everyone has but few people know how to solve.
This report is the result of years of research and
is drawn from hundreds of scientific studies,
deep experimentation in my own life, and
working in the trenches with countless clients to
help them overcome bad habits. It will give you
a step-by-step system for breaking any bad
habit in your life. Buckle up for a giant
counterintuitive nugget about how your brain
works and then we’ll dive into the strategy for
how to apply it.
All or Nothing...Usually Means All
The most common trap I see when trying to
break a bad habit is that we often assume we
have to make a choice: it’s either all or nothing.
Psychologists refer to this as “black or white
thinking.”
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The problem is if you say “never” to a behavior,
what you’re really doing is inviting your brain to
obsess about it. Through a series of careful
experiments, the late Harvard psychologist Dr.
Dan Wegner showed that thought suppression
doesn’t work. In fact, when we say “never,” we
might actually start thinking about it more.
For example, let’s just say you’re trying to eat
less Ben & Jerry’s and you decide a good first
step is to expunge any thought of Ben & Jerry’s
from your mind — if you catch yourself thinking
about it, you’ll snuff it out. Great plan. Except
what happens instead is that even though
your conscious brain dutifully follows your
request to not think about the temptation, your
subconscious brain goes into “scanner mode”
(think of one of those green radars on a Navy
ship circling around looking for other ships in
the vicinity and you’ll have the right idea). In
other words, your subconscious
brain keeps scanning your
“mental environment” and
asking itself, “Am I thinking
about Ben & Jerry’s? How
about now? And…um…now?”
In the process of scanning
for whether or not it’s thinking
about B &J’s, it, well, keeps thinking
about B & J’s. Your brain keeps dutifully trying
to locate the Ben and Jerry’s battleships —
which, ironically, makes you think about Ben
and Jerry’s even more.
This unfortunate feature of our brains is aptly
called the ironic rebound effect. The harder
you try to resist the thought, the bigger the
thought becomes. And the bigger the thought
becomes, the more likely you are to throw your
hands up in the air and say, “Forget it! Give me
the Ben & Jerry’s!”
So how do you get around this?
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Geo-fencing
In digital marketing, there’s a common
tool called “geo-fencing.” What this means
is that you can draw an invisible line
around a certain area — say, a conference
center — and market your product only to
people inside that invisible line. So, for
example, if your company sells comic
books and you know a big Comic-Con
gathering is happening in your city on a
particular weekend, you can target your
ads more effectively by only showing them
to people who are physically at that
conference center on that weekend. You
might find that annoying or creepy (or
both) but stay with me because if you’ve
ever wanted to break a bad habit, it’s
worth applying the same logic to creating
“invisible boundaries” where certain
behaviors are allowed and other
behaviors are not.
If you say “never,” what you’re really doing is
inviting your brain to obsess about it.
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Behavioral Geo-fencing
The secret sauce for breaking a bad habit is to
create a “behavioral geo-fence” around the
behavior you’re trying to stop. For example, you
might want to cut back on video games. What
behavioral geo-fencing allows you to do is to
still play video games occasionally, but only in
certain locations. Those locations might be few
and far between -- and that’s the genius of the
strategy. Your brain cares less about how often
it has access to its favorite behavior -- it cares
much more about whether or not it has access.
If you tell it never, it will start obsessively
thinking about it. In other words, you can make
a deal with your brain 🧠 -- let it know that it
can still have its favorite indulgence...as long as
it plays by your rules.
So how do you create those rules? Here’s the
step-by-step strategy for outsmarting your bad
habits in 5 simple steps.
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 The 5 Steps to Break Any Bad Habit
Step 1: Decide which bad habit you’d like to
work on. You’ll likely want to work on more
than one at a time. But brains work better
when they tackle things sequentially, not
simultaneously. So choose one bad habit
(and once you’ve crushed bad habit #1, next
month you can crush bad habit #2).
Step 2: Think about where you spend most of
your time. When you really think about it, you
can usually count on one hand where you
spend the majority of your day (e.g.,
work/home/car/school/etc.).
Step 3: Choose at least one of those locations
and draw an invisible line in your mind around
the boundaries of that place. For example, if
it’s where you live, you might draw a geo-
fence around the boundaries of your actual
property line or the property line of your
apartment building.
Step 4: Create an “off limits” rule within the
boundaries of that geo-fence. In other words,
you tell your brain that inside the geo-fence,
that behavior is a no-go, prohibited, against
🚫
the rules . Remember, your brain now knows
that it’s only within this geo-fence that the rule
applies, so it’s going to feel fine about it.
It won’t want to rebel because you haven’t
told it never.
Step 5: Combine more than one geo-fence.
The reality is that you will likely need to have
more than one geo-fence for your strategy to
work. Think about the top two or three places
where you spend the most time or are most
likely to do your bad habit.
Let’s say you want to cut back on soda. With
behavioral geo-fencing, you don’t say, “never
again,” but instead tell yourself that you
can have it, but just not at home, copyright © 2024
not at work, and not in the car.
That leaves restaurants and few other places —
but noticeably, places where you spend much
less time and, therefore, are less likely to do the
behavior. While we’re on soda, another nice
strategy is to make a “where I purchase”
boundary. So in this case, think of the
location(s) where you’re most likely to
purchase soda — maybe it’s gas stations.
Great. Gas stations are now a soda “no buy
zone.” In other words, behavioral geo-fencing is
infinitely flexible and should be tailored to your
unique behavior patterns and possible danger
zones.
The reality is that a soda here or there isn’t
going to kill you -- but soda every day might.
What will happen is when you put these steps
into action and flexibly adapt them as you
learn, within a short time you’ll decrease your
bad habit by 80-90%. You might even inch up
toward 95%. But you’re not going to want to get
rid of it completely. And that’s exactly why it
works -- you get to let go of perfection and
embrace (massive) progress instead. Talk
about having your cake and eating it too!
But you’ll need a few more tips to create
a rock-solid geo-fence strategy.
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 Geo-Fencing Tips
Tip #1: What do I do when I fudge the
boundaries?
At times, you may find yourself trying to fudge
the boundaries, discovering little ways to
cheat, and/or make exceptions. No problem.
That’s just human nature. But don’t give up —
it’s not because the tool doesn’t work. It’s likely
that you just need to tweak your setup.
It might just be that the boundary isn’t clear
enough. Thinking back to the gas station “no
buy zone” with soda, you may think to yourself,
“Hmmm…what about the gas station in the
parking lot of the grocery store — I think
that’s…technically part of the grocery store…
ummm, yes — give me that soda!” Again, this
requires tweaking, clarifying, and
recommitting.
Maybe gas stations aren’t enough and it
needs to include gas stations + grocery
stores. But then you think, “Hmmm…
Walgreens…isn’t that technically a
pharmacy?” No problem. Tweak again. Maybe
at that point, you need to change it to, “I only
drink soda at restaurants,” which finally
clarifies that all other locations have a geo-
fence around them. For you, this might be the
perfect solution because you don’t eat at
restaurants more than a couple of times per
month. But for someone else who eats out a
few times per week, it may be that restaurants
themselves are the best place to draw their
invisible geo-fence.
The point is that behavioral geo-fencing
should always be highly personalized. As you
can see, it’s important to approach this tool
flexibly — to try different things out until you
settle into a behavioral geo-fence strategy
that is consistently working for you.
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This often takes tweaking…and a little
patience. But if you can persist through the
inevitable setbacks, you’ll be shocked at how
well it works.
Tip #2: How big should my geo-fence be?
Good question. If not eating after 8 PM is your
goal but it’s not working, it may be that you
went too far, too fast, and a slower room-by-
room strategy is the key for you (e.g., week 1:
no eating in the kitchen after 8 PM, week 2: no
eating in the kitchen + bedroom after 8 PM,
week 3: no eating in the kitchen + bedroom +
family room after 8 PM, week 4: no eating in
the entire house after 8 PM.)
Or maybe you have a habit of watching TV in
bed but it’s become a little too much and
you’d like to get more sleep. Great. You can
draw an invisible geo-fence around your bed
and say, “No screens while in bed.”
Or maybe you have a thing with smoking in
the car. No problem. Draw a behavioral geo-
fence around your car and say that the rule is,
“No smoking in the car.”
Tip #3: What should I do when I break my
geo-fence rule? Did I just ruin it?
No. The reality is (as explained in Tip #1), you
might just have a geo-fence that’s too much,
too soon. Don’t beat yourself up for breaking
the rule -- simply recommit and try again. If it
happens more than once, re-draw your geo-
fence by making it smaller. Then slowly build it
out over the month. This will gradually build up
your tolerance for resisting. You’ll start gaining
confidence and self-trust you didn’t think were
possible. Remember, never say never.
Which leads us to lockers and blockers.
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and I’ll Train You on How to Help
Your Client Break That Bad Habit
Now that you know the secret for breaking bad habits, you likely have a client in mind who has a
challenge, problem, or bad habit that always seems to get in their way.

Click on the link below and we'll spend 30 minutes of one-on-one time teaching you exactly
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