Short YouTube advice segment explaining two practical methods to break unwanted habits: (1) remove or avoid environmental triggers when possible (e.g., change your route to avoid a fast-food chain), and (2) replace the unwanted habit with a healthier substitute and arrange barriers/facilitators (e.g., put your phone out of sight and place a book on the couch).
If we eliminate the trigger, the habit's not there. So if you think, okay, every time I drive past this fast food chain, I feel like going in, you know, and I drive past it. Every day after work, we'll drive a different way home. If you can, like, try to avoid the trigger as much as possible. Now, that's not always possible, because sometimes your trigger is getting home or getting in bed or sitting on the couch. So then the second method to break your old habits is replacing that unwanted habit with a healthier habit. So you can actually preempt it and say, I know when I sit on the couch, I'm triggered to scroll on my phone, and what I'm going to do instead is read a book. And so then to do those, you want to create barriers to accessing your phone and facilitators to having access to your book, that barrier might be putting the phone out of sight in a different room. And then the facilitator for your book is you have your book sitting on the couch, ready, waiting for you. So it's much easier to pick up.
