5 Steps to Breaking Your “After Work Drink” Habit

Seeing the list can keep the change you’re trying to make fresh in your mind. If you do happen to fall back into the habit, your list reminds you why you want to keep trying. Take a few minutes to consider why you want to break the habit and any benefits you see resulting from the change. Listing these reasons may help you think of a few that hadn’t occurred to you yet. Spend a few days tracking your habit to see whether it follows any patterns.

Realistically, experts believe it takes about 10 weeks (2 to 3 months) or more to break an unwanted happen. Of course, some habits may take more or less time to break. It’s likely from a study involving people who had plastic surgery. Most of them adjusted to their changed appearance within 3 weeks.

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Sarah-Len Mutiwasekwa is a mental health advocate whose efforts are invested in breaking the stigma around talking about mental health and increasing awareness of these issues in Africa. What’s more, tracking your progress works in the same way as building your good habits. It focuses your attention on the essential things and provides you with the motivation to keep moving forward. It can also provide you with valuable data points that can help you to identify your pitfalls and critical points. Then comes the joy of going a week, later a month, then the first year. Fortunately, by changing your habit loop, you can more easily solidify the new behavior, which will make it much more difficult for you to return to the old habit.

Eventually, after you see rewards from the new habit — more energy and less of a sugar crash — the urge to keep doing this behavior might outweigh the desire to pursue the old habit. You might have an easier time breaking a habit if you replace the unwanted behavior with a new behavior, instead of simply trying to stop the unwanted behavior. After a few days of tracking your behavior, you realize you tend to stay up later if you start watching TV or chatting with friends after dinner. One thing that many listeners who’ve tried a dry January — or any break from alcohol — told us is that their friends didn’t really “get it.” “Why, why, why,” people told us they were asked. Listeners told us they feel compelled to make up excuses. What many people don’t realize is that alcohol produces a toxic effect on the body.

Yes, After-Work Drinking Is a Serious Workplace Issue

On the fourth day, you have a cigarette and spend the rest of the night feeling like a failure. But other habits, such as biting your nails, drinking caffeine too late in the day, or hitting snooze too many times, might not be so beneficial. Most of our members (90%) have tried cutting back, however, few experienced any long-term success in changing their relationship with alcohol. These numbers show us that it is HARD to break the routine once we have developed a dependence on alcohol to unwind at the end of the day. It’s not too hard to meet people on forums and Facebook groups who share a similar desire to develop good habits.

In psychology, there is a term called ego depletion, which basically means your willpower has a limited amount of energy every day. When it’s overexerted, it becomes hard to control your impulses. Pretty much everything you do is based on a habit you’ve developed at some point in your life. The key to finding your fat-burning zone is often to exercise far more gently than many of us might expect.

Phase III: Build a Support System to Help you Break your Bad Habit

Every plan looks perfect on paper, but they rarely work when you experience a major temptation. You might do well for a while, but it’s hard to stick to a new routine when your life is full of stress and triggers. What you’re doing here is identifying your “weak spots” and drinking after work creating a plan for how you’ll act. This will be your first line of defense against a bad habit impulse. So whenever this craving strikes, you’ll know exactly what to do instead. Whenever you experience a “bad habit trigger,” you should substitute it with a new routine.

Her fields of interest include Asian languages and literature, Japanese translation, cooking, natural sciences, sex positivity, and mental health. In particular, she’s committed to helping decrease stigma around mental health issues. Breaking habits doesn’t have to be an entirely hands-on, physical process.

So how do I stop drinking when I get home?

Everyone has habits, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them. Some are pretty useful — maybe you lay out your clothes for work the night before or automatically turn off the lights when you leave a room. “The alcohol was certainly a numbing agent,” listener Mark Vowers told us. Vowers says not drinking makes him feel more present — more grounded. “Say, hey, it’s dry January,” and tell them why you’re taking a break.

• Remember, triggers are the first step in developing a habit.
• It’s garnished with a flamed orange peel, which adds a bit of magic and surprise to the drink.
• Which one works best will depend entirely on your individual circumstances and specific inclinations.
• He promised himself that when he was tempted to spend too much time on his cell phone, he’d disrupt the urge by picking up a book instead.