The Habit Isn’t the Problem. The Trigger Is.
Nobody reaches for the phone, the snack, the drink or the argument out of nowhere. There is always a moment just before, and that moment is where the habit actually lives. The reaching is just the end of a chain that started earlier, usually somewhere you weren’t looking.
Most people try to break a habit at the last link. They stand at the fridge and attempt to be a different person. That’s the one point in the whole chain where you have the least say, because by the time you’re at the fridge, every earlier decision has already been made for you.
Find the link before the link
Try this for three days. Every time the habit happens, don’t fight it. Just write down what happened in the ten minutes before. Where were you, what time was it, who was there, what were you feeling, what had you just finished or failed to finish.
Three days is usually enough to see it. The late-night snacking turns out to be the fifteen minutes after you close the laptop. The phone scroll turns out to be the moment a task gets slightly hard. The snapping at your spouse turns out to be the drive home, the one you spend replaying the day.
Once you’ve seen the trigger, the habit stops being a mystery about your character and becomes a plumbing problem. Plumbing problems are fixable.
Four things you can do with a trigger
Remove it. If the trigger is the chair in front of the television, the chair goes somewhere else. If it’s the app, the app goes. People underrate this because it feels like cheating. It isn’t cheating. It’s engineering.
Move it. Some triggers can’t be removed but can be relocated. The after-work slump is going to happen; it doesn’t have to happen in the kitchen. Walk in the door and walk straight back out for ten minutes.
Reassign it. This is the strongest one. Keep the trigger and change what it leads to. Laptop closed is now the cue for a glass of water and a short walk, not the pantry. The brain doesn’t especially care what follows the cue, as long as something does. For the first couple of weeks, it will care. Then it won’t.
Interrupt it. Put a small obstacle between trigger and habit. A rubber band around the phone. The snacks on a high shelf. Not to stop you, just to create a two-second gap where a decision can happen. Two seconds is often all the decision needs.
What I got wrong for years
I used to believe that the people who kept good habits had more self-control than I did. I spent a long time trying to acquire self-control and it never arrived. What I eventually noticed was that the disciplined people I knew weren’t exercising willpower at the fridge. They weren’t at the fridge. They’d handled the trigger earlier, often without being able to tell you they’d done it.
Willpower is the backup system. If you’re using it every day, the primary system is broken, and the primary system is the trigger.
Three days
Pick the one habit you most want gone. Don’t fight it. Watch it for three days and write down the ten minutes before. Then do one of the four things above to the trigger. You’ll be surprised how little resistance you meet at the fridge once you’ve stopped arriving there.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
One email when the book opens on Kickstarter. Nothing else. Already reading the book? Your Cheat Sheet is at wisdomdeck.com/free.
Coming soon on 
The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.