Pruning and Trimming: How To Deal with Bad Habits

Often, people have bad habits they want to get rid of—smoking, hitting the snooze button too often, procrastinating, and many, many more. The problem is that habits are habits, which can be both beneficial and counterproductive.

Getting rid of bad habits is a general theme when it comes to making New Year’s resolutions. People write lists with many items such as less sugar, less smoking, and less processed food, as well as Growth Habit-like items such as hitting the gym more often, reading more, etc.

As you may know, most people fail miserably with their resolutions, and the whole conundrum repeats itself every single year. The mindset is wrong; simply focusing on getting rid of bad stuff in your life misses the point. Pruning a young oak tree does not just eliminate unneeded parts; it encourages new growth at the same time. That’s how pruning works. It does not necessarily view the bad habits as something that simply must be destroyed because clearly the older growth had its purpose.

With the HabitSystem, the purpose of your old bad habits is to help you recognize and learn beneficial habits while letting go, or pruning, the habits that are no longer needed.

As you can see, New Year’s resolutions are more designed to stop doing something, rather than starting something. It’s important to have more of a “pruning” approach, where we work to encourage new growth, just like in the case of the oak tree. Trimming and pruning is healthful to any organism, as it helps eliminate parts that are no longer needed to make way for new, fresh growth that is more beneficial.

There are many reasons why people fail to set reasonable resolutions and why they fail miserably to meet those resolutions. Many of these reasons were outlined in the beginning of this book. Most of the time, it boils down to completely unrealistic goals. If you were already unable to do the things you want to do, how is a jam-packed list of resolutions going to change anything?

Most bad habits are Behavioral Habits. True to their definition, they cannot be Growth Habits because bad habits lead to decline rather than growth. The most common bad habits involve engaging in too much mindless TV-watching as well as totally unnecessary social media meanderings.

From my experience, most people want to:

• Drink less alcohol
• Smoke less cigarettes
• Watch less TV
• Spend less time on social media or the internet in general
• Spend less money on unnecessary bullshit, expensive coffee, and other stuff

At least 90% of the bad habits people want to get rid of fall into these categories. The other 10% includes variations of the mentioned items or more specific cases.

Obviously, getting rid of bad habits is not easy. If it were easy, more people would do it. Most people lack a consistent approach. The mere desire to do less of something does not suffice.

The key to tackling bad habits is to look for underlying reasons. First, why is it that you drink too much alcohol? Second, why do you want to change it? Third, why are you unhappy with the status quo?

The second and third questions are just as important as the first. You need to know why you want to change, and you need to think about how you would like it to be.

Watch less TV, spend less time on social media

If you spend too much time on social media, chances are you have nothing better to do. Why is that the case? Why do you spend your time with social media rather than doing something of real value? The same is true for TV.

The solution is not to ditch TV and social media. That would only change the symptom of a problem looming deeper. Your life is still not interesting enough and you have too much free time to spare. If you do nothing proactively and simply give up TV or social media, you will find other (unproductive) outlets that add similarly little value.

The solution is to tackle the root cause. Why do you have enough time to watch mindless TV shows or look at funny videos on social media? This is the question you have to answer. Instilling Growth Habits will make you become a producer rather than a consumer, and the more you intentionally add and work on Growth Habits, the easier it is to defeat Entropy.

Alcohol and Cigarettes

Alcohol and cigarettes are a different topic that I’m unable to completely cover in this book. While I understand that many people do have problems with drinking and smoking, both have never been a problem for me. I have never smoked in my life and I drink moderately. Also, I think a book is not a viable solution to seriously tackle these issues.

You don’t have to have a negative view of the old habits you’re trying to eliminate. Stressing about it will not help you in dealing with them. Instead, try to think of it more like preparing yourself for future development. Let the old habits go; you don’t need them anymore, and now you’re just making room for new and more beneficial habits.