“Is there any easier way to break bad habits?”
The easiest way is to build new habits. Bear with a little science—The different neural pathways that make it easier to do good and bad things have a thing in common—they get stronger the more the actions are done and vice versa. Building new habits reinforces new pathways, which makes the old ones weak within a few weeks.
“I know the science; let’s do this now!”
Although I would also like that to happen, the reality isn’t always that smooth sailing. Many things can obstruct us from creating new habits such as a lack of confidence in being able to break bad habits, lack of motivation to push through every day, feeling like there’s not enough time to build new habits and many more things.
Good news if you are facing such problems, because focusing on just developing new habits starts to solve many of these problems by itself. For example, let’s consider for a moment that I want to build a habit of exercising 30 minutes a day. Now, neither I expect myself to achieve 30 minutes on the first day, nor should I be expecting that in the first place. I may do 5 mins one day, 8 mins another, 0 mins another, and so on, which is definitely nowhere near my target at all—not even one-third.
But what that does is that it builds a sense of achievement in me gradually that I have done a lot better in the past. Spending even 8 minutes on the good habit means 8 fewer minutes possible for bad habits—which also curbs that somewhat. That can form cracks in the defeated attitude that I can’t curb my bad habits easily—or curb at all. However, this is just the first step.