How to Break Bad Habits with Ed Robinson

Breaking bad habits isn't about stopping, but substituting.

It's easy to think of habits falling into black and white categories -- exercising good, biting your nails bad. But habits also sit on a continuum in our ability to exercise control over them: Some are mild, like taking off your shoes and dumping in the middle of the living every night; others moderate like eating dinner in front of the TV, or drinking too much when you go to a party; and then those that are strong and addictive — like smoking, the nail-biting, watching .

Habits become hard to break because they are deeply wired by constant repetition into our brains. And when you add pleasure to them — like you have with drugs or , for example — the pleasure centers of the midbrain get fired up as well, and continue to fire long after the habits stop, creating the cravings that folks struggle with.