Breaking Bad Habits: What Actually Works

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Hi there,

My nephew is 18 months old. He has a move.

When he doesn't get what he wants, or when he's tired, overwhelmed, bored, or just existing as a tiny person with big feelings, he throws himself backward. Full force, head first. Whatever's behind him takes the impact: floor, couch, occasionally a very alarmed adult knee.

It's become a habit. And watching it happen, I had two questions:

Why is he doing this?
How do we make him stop?

Two days later, I was in the library checking out a book with one of the best titles ever written: Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor.

Pryor wasn't a therapist, motivational speaker or coach. She was a dolphin trainer.

Here's the thing about dolphins: you can't leash them. Can't bridle them. Can't yell at them into compliance. If a dolphin doesn't like what you're doing, it just swims away. So if you want to change a dolphin's behavior, you have to actually understand how behavior works.

After years in the water, Pryor figured it out. Her core insight was deceptively simple:

She developed principles that worked on dolphins. Then she realized they worked on humans too: spouses, kids, coworkers and even ourselves.

Here's where most people get it wrong: they think reinforcement means praise or rewards.

It doesn't.

Reinforcement is attention. It's emotional energy. It's what your nervous system learns is meaningful. In other words,it's what gets your brain to think: This matters. Do it again.

Which means a lot of the behaviors we're trying to stop, in others and in ourselves, we're accidentally training into existence.

Take my nephew.

Every time he threw himself backward, the entire room snapped to attention. Voices got loud. Energy redirected toward him. Adults reorganized around him instantly.

From his nervous system's perspective, the behavior worked. It was an effective strategy for an 18-month-old to influence his environment.

The problem wasn't the flop itself. The problem was what he got from it: instant control of every adult in the room.

Most high-functioning adults are running the exact same loop. We just call it something else.

We call it overthinking, self-doubt, Type-A diligence, replaying conversations at 2 AM.

We're training these habits without realizing it.

I caught myself doing this recently. I'd finished a legal brief with hours of solid research, airtight arguments, and clean logic. It’s work I know how to do well.

And yet: I kept opening the Google doc. Not to change anything. But just to look, to reread, and double-check for gaps I'd somehow missed.

I told myself I was being diligent, thorough, and responsible. (That's the language we use when we don't trust ourselves.)

But honestly? I wasn't improving the brief. I was soothing my nerves.

Each time I reopened it, I got a small hit: tension released, a sense of control, the feeling I was doing something about the anxiety instead of just sitting with it.

That relief was the reward.

The parallel was impossible to miss.

My nephew throwing himself backward. Me reopening the document for the fifth time. We were both using the same mechanism. Both of us performing a slightly ridiculous act because it reliably produced something we wanted: attention, control, relief, safety.

This is where most capable, conscientious people go wrong.

We attack the behavior itself. We use force, self-lectures, shame dressed up as discipline. We try to willpower our way out of overthinking, self-doubt, compulsive checking.

But Pryor's work shows something more uncomfortable: you don't extinguish a behavior by fighting it. You extinguish it by removing the reward.

Overthinking survives because it gives you something: the illusion you're solving the problem.

Self-doubt survives because questioning yourself feels safer and more comfortable than trusting yourself to be wrong.

Rechecking survives because it quiets the anxiety, for a few minutes.

You're not broken. You've just trained bad habits. And what you trained, you can untrain.

Here's what actually changes things:

You can't accidentally reward a habit you don't do.

So the work isn't fighting the overthinking once it starts. The work is catching yourself right before you engage in the bad habit and doing something different instead.

Close the document and leave it closed. Send the email without rereading it a fourth time. Let the silence sit instead of filling it with reassurance.

These moments feel like nothing. That's why we ignore them. But this is exactly how you retrain yourself, one boring decision at a time.

When I finally closed that document and walked away, nothing bad happened. But what did happen: I learned I could trust my work without checking it obsessively first.

Now I hit send on emails after one read-through. I close briefs without reopening them. I leave conversations without replaying them over and over. I make decisions without polling five people first.

I've trained myself to trust my work instead of soothing the anxiety. And my nervous system learned something new. That trust doesn't require compulsive Type-A checking.

My nephew will outgrow his backward flop. Most toddlers do.

Adults are trickier. We keep our versions longer. We polish them and call them professionalism, due diligence, being careful.

But here’s the thing, you're not stuck with the habits you have. You're just really good at practicing them.

Stop asking what's broken. Stop asking what you need to fix or eliminate or fight.

And start asking: What (mis)behavior am I rewarding?

Because the moment you see it, really see it, everything shifts.

You're not resisting a bad habit when you walk away from the document. You're installing a new one. You're not fighting overthinking when you hit send without rereading. You're teaching yourself what trust actually feels like.

The behaviors you reward grow stronger. The ones you stop feeding quietly fade.

You've spent years accidentally training yourself into these patterns.

Now you get to intentionally train yourself out.

And the first step is just by paying attention to what you're reinforcing then choosing to reinforce something better.

That's the work.

See you next week,

Shakila

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