By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Sometimes trying to break a habit only makes it worse.

If you have a habit that you wish you had never started, gambling, drinking, drug use, overeating, or whatever, and want to change it, take a strategy from the big boy’s playbook.

The major chain retailers all want you in their store. To get you in the door and then make a regular shopper out of you, they have to get you out of their competitor’s store. There are right ways to do this and wrong ways.

These strategies are not about will power or won’t power. They also have little to do with your motivation. In the future, we will talk more about how to motivate yourself and stay motivated. When we talk about that we will look at why it is so easy to motivate yourself to do fun things and so hard to motivate yourself to do disagreeable things. Here is how retailers motivate you.

The ways major retailers get you to switch is a blueprint for changing your behavior.  Here are some things the stores do and how you can use these techniques to end a habit.

1. Do not focus on the behavior you want to stop.

This is where most self-improvement programs go wrong. The more you try to not do something the stronger the urges to do exactly that thing. One retailer does not, if they are smart, run commercials telling you to “don’t shop at brand X.”

Commercials like that only remind you of brand x. Occasionally retailers forget and do this. The result is not more customers in their store, even if they get them out of the competitor’s store. (See the post on “Don’t think about elephants.”)

If you are trying to get rid of a habit like drinking, focusing on not drinking is likely to get you to find another habit to take the drinking’s place. That new habit, like gambling, may be just as undesirable as the old habit.

People in recovery find that just quitting the old habit leaves you miserable. There is a whole body of literature on “dry drunks” people who have quit the drinking but they are still miserable. So what do you do?

2. Create a competing behavior.

Stores try to give you a reason to try them, just once. They use coupons, specials this week only, offers, and the like to create a really strong reason for you to come to them this one time.

With undesirable habits, we need to create a new positive habit to replace the old one. This is one reason A.A. or church services are so helpful to recovering people. It creates a new habit to replace the old one.

3. Make sure the new habit is enjoyable.

If the store gets you in the door they should do all they can to make this new experience a positive one. Smart retailers bring in extra help for the sale even if they are selling things at cost.

They want you to get service and get it promptly if they are to have any chance of keeping you as a regular customer. Stores that forget this and make you wait in long lines or treat you rudely end up sending you back to the place you used to shop even if you didn’t really like it there.

If your change effort involves pain and doing without then you are likely to say why bother and head right back to what you used to do. Make this new change behavior enjoyable and the chances that this fun thing will replace the old undesired behavior.

4. Keep coming back.

Stores know that if you switch your shopping pattern and visit a new place three times in a row there is a strong chance you have a new regular place to shop. This is why they use coupons that have expiration dates, offers that allow you so much off or something for free each week or month.

Make a habit of the new behavior and it is likely to persist.

This is why recovery groups will suggest 30 meetings in 30 days or even 90 meetings in 90 days. Anything you do that many times in a row will become your new default behavior. Even if you start missing meetings down the road, the habit of going to meetings instead of drinking is now firmly entrenched.

So if you really want to stop a bad habit take these simple steps. Create a new habit to replace the old one. Make it fun to do. Minimize any negative parts of the new behavior and keep doing it over and over until it is your new default behavior.

Do these steps and you can be a habit shaper just like the big boys.

Related articles

• Flavors of motivation – Personality traits and factors (counselorssoapbox.com)
• Learning to feel (counselorssoapbox.com)

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

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