Break Your Bad Habits Using Association
August 30th, 2007On the heels of my post about the role of automatic association contributing to bad decisions, Neuromarketing has a post describing the visual relationship with chocolate addiction. Basically, pictures of chocolate stimulate the same part of our brain that is active during habit forming and addictive behaviors.
Neuromarketing also suggests that marketers of less well-known brands of chocolate include actual pictures on their packaging as a way of enticing people to buy, and that people trying to avoid chocolate should also avoid chocolate in video and pictures.
I think they are right, but there is more that could be done, and can really you avoid images of all the things you want to do but are trying not to? You can think of it as a self-discipline issue, and Steve Pavlina has an great series on self-discipline.
But we can use some of our knowledge of decision making to help as well. Aside from examining our self-stories to help fight advertising, lets use the fact that so much of our behavior is associative in origin.
If you want to stop eating chocolate, don’t smell the flowers
One of the best ways to break a habit or resist temptation incarnate is to avoid the things we associate with the temptation.
If as a child you were given chocolate on Sunday after working in the flowerbed, you probably associate flowers with chocolate. Every time you see a flower, the part of your brain that thinks of chocolate is also stimulated.
It’s a silly example, but it illustrates how seemingly unrelated things can be causing us to want the things we are trying to resist.
First begin by thinking of all the times you eat chocolate. Where are you? What are you wearing? Is it hot outside, or raining? What did you eat earlier? How are you feeling?
What kinds of things show up repeatedly in your chocolate eating experiences? If every time you wear that red shirt you have to go to the store for an afternoon chocolate snack, you might associate something with the shirt with chocolate.
Since I’m trying to break my chai addiction, I’m going to keep a log of every time I want to drink chai and write down as many details as I can. I’ll post back next week with the results.
Have a habit or a food you are trying to resist? Feel free to do the same over the next week and let me know what your associations were. Then next week we’ll start trying to break the habit by avoiding the things that we associate with it.
-zot
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