You can disrupt a behavior you don’t want by removing the prompt. This isn’t always easy, but removing the prompt is your best first move to stop a behavior from happening. A few years ago I went to the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. I walked into my hotel room and threw my bag on the bed. When I scanned the room, I saw something on the bureau. “Oh nooooo,” I said out loud to absolutely no one. There was an overflowing basket of goodies. Pringles. Blue chips. A giant lollipop. A granola bar. Peanuts. I try to eat healthy foods, but salty snacks are delicious. I knew the goody bin would be a problem for me at the end of every long day. It would serve as a prompt: Eat me! I knew that if the basket sat there I would eventually cave. The blue chips would be the first to go. Then I would eat those peanuts. So I asked myself what I had to do to stop this behavior from happening. Could I demotivate myself? No way, I love salty snacks. Can I make it harder to do? Maybe. I could ask the front desk to raise the price on the snacks or remove them from the room. But that might be slightly awkward. So what I did was remove the prompt. I put the beautiful basket of temptations on the lowest shelf in the TV cabinet and shut the door. I knew the basket was still in the room, but the treats were no longer screaming EAT ME at full volume. By the next morning, I had forgotten about those salty snacks. I’m happy to report that I survived three days in Austin without opening the cabinet again. Notice that my one-time action disrupted the behavior by removing the prompt. If that hadn’t worked, there were other dials I could have adjusted — but prompts are the low-hanging fruit of Behavior Design. Teaching the Behavior Model Now that you’ve seen how my Behavior Model applies to various types of behavior, I’ll show you more ways to use this model in the pages that follow.

The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

In dog obedience school we learned that if you want an undesirable behavior to go away, you stop paying attention to it.

EXPLORE WAYS TO STOP A HABIT The Fogg Behavior Model applies to all types of behavior change. In this exercise, you’ll explore simple ways to stop a habit. Step 1: Write down three habits that you’d like to stop. Try to be specific. For instance, write “Stop buying soda for lunch” rather than “Stop drinking soda.” Step 2: For each habit, think of ways you might remove (or avoid) the prompt. If you can’t think of anything, that’s okay. Move on to the next step. Step 3: For each habit, think of ways to make it harder to do (ability). Step 4: For each habit, think of ways to reduce your motivation. Step 5: For each habit, select your best solution from steps 2, 3, and 4. Extra Credit: Put your solution into practice.

Does anyone really believe that a pattern of exploitation old as our civilization can be halted legislatively, judicially, or through any means other than an absolute rejection of the mindset that engineers the exploitation in the first place, followed by actions based on that rejection? This means if we want to stop the destruction, we have to root out the mindset.

If you want to successfully change a behavior, don’t try to change the behavior by itself. Change the structure that influences or supports the behavior, and the behavior will change. If you don’t want to eat ice cream, don’t buy it in the first place.

Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely — even if they go unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy. It is hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions. It takes too much energy. In the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in. To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

When you set up too many Context Prompts, they can actually have the opposite effect — you become desensitized and fail to heed the prompt.

No behavior happens without a prompt.

To change somebody's behavior, change the level of respect she receives by giving her a fine reputation to live up to. Act as though the trait you are trying to influence is already one of the person's outstanding characteristics.

Make the behavior so tiny that you don’t need much motivation.

Some spoke critically of neoliberalism, the sense that the idea of the free market has somehow crowded out all others. This was true enough, but the very use of the word was usually a kowtow before an unchangeable hegemony. Other critics spoke of the need for disruption, borrowing a term from the analysis of technological innovations. When applied to politics, it again carries the implication that nothing can really change, that the chaos that excites us will eventually be absorbed by a self-regulating system. The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess. —

How to Break a Bad Habit Inversion of the 1st law (Cue): Make it invisible. Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving): Make it unattractive. Inversion of the 3rd law (Response): Make it difficult. Inversion of the 4th law (Reward): Make it unsatisfying.

Don’t try to force or nag people into doing what you want. Accept that they are free to choose. But you help them choose what you want.