Breaking a Habit You Share With Someone Else
A shared habit has a cue that is another person, and that is the one cue you cannot remove. What changes, what to ask for, and what not to try.
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The Habits You Only Have at Work
The same person, two places, two sets of behavior. Habits are attached to contexts rather than to people, and there is measured evidence for what that means.
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What Fills the Space a Habit Leaves Behind
You stopped, and now there is a hole in your evening. That hole is the size of the thing you removed, and something is going to move into it.
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Boredom as a Cue: The Habits That Fill Empty Hands
The trigger is not boredom, it is the specific gap where boredom arrives. Where those gaps sit in a day, and why removing the behavior widens the gap.
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Gradual Reduction or Cold Turkey: How to Choose
Nobody has measured which works better for ordinary habits, and the pages that say otherwise are citing substance research at something else. What decides it.
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Adding Friction: Making the Unwanted Habit Take One More Step
The delay does not have to defeat you, it has to interrupt you. Where to put friction, why the numbers you have read are invented, and when it stops working.
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Replace, Do Not Resist: Why Substitution Beats Willpower
Removing a behavior leaves a cue with nothing attached to it, and the cue does not go away. What a substitute has to match, and where the idea overreaches.
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Finding the Real Trigger: The Four-Question Log
You cannot redesign a cue you have not found, and you will not find it by thinking about it. A log that takes ten seconds an instance and a week to answer.
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When Repeated Relapse Means the Design Is Wrong, Not You
Five failures at the same habit is a pattern, and a pattern is data about the plan. Six design faults that produce repeat failure, and the one that is not one.
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Taking a Break From a Habit, or Have You Quit?
No research defines where a break becomes a quit. The distinguishing feature is not elapsed days, it is whether a return condition exists. How to tell.