Giving Up Something Sucks
and why I think removing a habit is way harder than starting a new one.
Hey friends 👋
I have been trying to eat healthily and reduce my social media usage for the past few weeks. And I realised that removing a habit seems super hard to me compared to adding a new one. I’ve been running and writing (this weekly newsletter & personal journaling) on a regular basis for the past 3 months. I also wrote a post about my experience of building these habits, but I consistently fail at removing something from my routine. I still don’t know how to overcome this but I’ve realised the reasons for this to happen.
Fucked up reward mechanism
I don’t have enough dopamine hits when I try to remove a bad habit. Whenever I finish my run or complete writing my newsletter, I feel good about it. There is a clear start and an end to the activity; which is not possible in removing a habit. When I’m trying to control my social media usage, the stress of not using it keeps building up over time and it’ll explode at some point. I don’t have any dopamine mechanism to help me keep going. After a point, I lose motivation and end up consuming more because people have built a world-class reward mechanism for you to keep consuming more stuff.
Dealing with emptiness
I’m left with an empty feeling of not doing something when I try to remove a habit. Dealing with emptiness is hard because my mind keeps going to the same activity over and over again. When I’m working late at night, I have the craving of ordering food from Swiggy. The craving doesn’t go away until I order something or do something about it. Simply avoiding the craving doesn’t work until I replace it with something else. Unless I have a very good replacement activity, it’s way harder to get rid of the existing one.
Most of the tools on the internet are focused on helping you build a new habit. This is great, but I haven’t seen as many tools that help you to remove a habit. Adding and removing habits are fundamentally different and I don’t see many tools that factor in these differences.
If you know of any app or website that helps you do this, please share it with me! I’m also looking to dive deeper into this to see if I can build something here. Cheers!
💫 This week in Read Write Run
A 10-day newsletter series on how Jack Butcher built Visualise Value and his learnings along the way. Loving the simplicity and the impact of the ideas shared by him. Do give it a shot.
🎙 University of Michigan Students Pitch Us Their Startups
Wonderful pod. I felt like shit and inspired after watching this. These folks are about the same age as me and they are building crazy things! This non-profit org named Internet Activism is building crazy highly impactful stuff with just 5 folks from college. Crazy!
🏃 Run
A consistent week after a lot of travelling in the past weeks. 5 days, 5km per day and reached my 25 km goal. Also, Strava made a year in sport report similar to the Spotify Wrapped, and I should say it’s pretty neat. Very well done and I enjoyed going through them. Here’s my yearly report summary:
Hi Rajesh, Two things helped me in changing my habits.
1. Realising the people we inspire won't be doing it and that's why they became our inspiration.
2. Specific to social media, after scrolling social media for 5 minutes stop it and try to recall what we scrolled through. Gradual change to long form content which is pretty useful though may solve it.
Keeping on thinking that we didn't do the habit today makes us to do. Engage yourself in some other stressful activity for a week where you can't find time to do the habit.