behavior elimination diet™
a plan to tackle old behaviors that no longer serve you
2023 is more than halfway over, and my New Year’s resolutions are going horribly. Everything that I’ve wanted to focus on, I haven’t been. I’ve been at the whims of my own anxieties, tossed about in the sea of my own fears.
It’s a familiar cycle that has played out before:
Me: *receives a work email at 10pm*
Anxiety: You better respond to that right now. If you don’t, your coworkers will think that you suck at your job and you’ll get fired and Favorite Partner and Beloved Mentor will hate you and wonder what they ever saw in you in the first place and it will be humiliating and sad and pathetic and very, very public.
Me: But I’m trying to work on my book proposal…? It’s important to me? It’s something I really want to do?
Anxiety: Please. Your book proposal is still a blank page. You’ve already screwed it up. Don’t screw up your ACTUAL JOB, too. It’s all you have.
Me: Oh, god, you’re right. I’m a failure. I’ve been failing at everything. At least responding to this email will be a little productive. *responds to email*
Then I feel better for about an hour before hating myself again, because I did the easier thing AGAIN instead of the harder thing that I actually wanted to do. I completed the smaller task AGAIN instead of making space for the larger project that I had been putting off. I chose the the productivity equivalent of junk food AGAIN over the more time-consuming prep needed for the longer-term goal.
Ugh.
Why do we do this to ourselves, this self-sabotaging of new habits and life changes and resolutions? The worst part is that it oftentimes doesn’t even look like self-sabotage, especially if you’re a productive procrastinator like me—you still work on something. It’s just not the thing that you wanted to work on.
This is how we get stuck in jobs we like but don’t love, answer one more email even as our family calls us to dinner, say “yes” to that meeting which requires canceling our fitness class. Not only is it comforting and familiar, sure, but it’s also still “productive.”
Literal toxic productivity; not the mindset. It would actually be better if the Old Behavior we were trying to get rid of were completely unproductive. At least then we could tip the scales of productivity in favor of New Behavior, guilt-free.
I blame loss aversion—the logical fallacy where the pain of losing $100 is larger than the pleasure from finding $100—for this distinct brand of toxic productivity. This cognitive bias over-indexes potential losses. We don’t value the potential equivalent gain in the same way.
Even though I wanted to work on the book proposal more than answer yet another late-night email, I never could—writing was new and what I didn’t have, lawyering was old and what I already had. I couldn’t not continue answering all emails as quickly as I possibly could. But I already wasn’t writing, so what was one more day not writing? Simply status quo.
I’ve been falling into this same loss aversion pattern again with my current goals. If you’re finding yourself stuck in old routines and productively procrastinating on all of your new goals, too, then a Behavior Elimination Diet™ may be just what you need.1
Here’s how it goes:
Decide on a set period of time where you’ll commit to not engaging in the Old Behavior. There isn’t a magic number like 28 days—just pick a number that is both challenging and not too scary for you. (Mine’s a month—I love planning in biweekly, monthly, and quarterly increments. It just feels right to me.) This period is basically a “forced loss” period that attempts to circumvent the loss aversion bias so you can focus solely on the gains from New Behavior. Forget the fear of losing what you have—it’s already lost.
Add in New Behavior. Now that you’ve consciously chosen to eliminate the Old Behavior, you don’t have to stress about the productivity loss from not enacting Old Behavior anymore. (Stop thinking about it—it’s gone. The end. Bye bye.) Now you have more time to start New Behavior. And if you feel the draw of Old Behavior, redirect yourself to New Behavior instead—you told yourself you wouldn’t act on Old Behavior for X time, so stick to that.
Add in next New Behavior. If you have multiple New Behaviors that you’re trying to integrate, don’t try to do New Behaviors 1, 2, and 3 all at the same time. Once you feel good about the integration of New Behavior 1, then and only then move on to adding New Behavior 2.
Contextualize messing up. If you mess up once or occasionally, don’t worry about it. That’s to be expected. If you mess up and end up defaulting to Old Behavior 100% of the time, that’s a sign that the time period from #1 is too long or that New Behavior needs to be broken into smaller subparts. And if you were doing fine with New Behavior 1 but consistently relapse into Old Behavior with the addition of New Behavior 2, it’s a sign that something about New Behavior 2 is inducing stress or boredom or other comfort-seeking feelings.
Recognize the role of stress. When New Behavior also causes us stress, it becomes more likely for us to eschew New Behavior in favor of comforting ol’ Old Behavior. It is near-impossible to quit Old Behavior and institute New Behavior without attendant stress management tools. In the short-term, use the physiological sigh (a pattern of breathing involving two inhales through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth) and end your showers with ten seconds of cold (yes, cold) water. In the long-term, prioritize your relationships that make you feel connected, exercise regularly, eat well, SLEEP, and practice mindfulness. Don’t expect yourself to be superhuman in the face of chronic stress.
I’ll be starting this Behavior Elimination Diet™ in August to target my Old Behavior of mindless content creation. Despite wanting to focus more on creating longform content—on Substack, YouTube, my book that I’m under contract to write (!!!!)—I find myself panicking weekly about TikTok because that’s where I started. It’s what I know and what I have, and I’m terrified of any loss of momentum related to TikTok. And it’s easy to post a TikTok, cross-post it to Instagram and YouTube Shorts, and feel relieved momentarily.
But it’s only ever for a moment. Because it’s not what I set out to do. ◆
What do you think about the Behavior Elimination Diet™? Do you have any Old Behaviors that you want to try this out on with me? What New Behaviors are presenting a challenge for you? Let me know in the comments!
Yes, I made this up myself! Call me, James Clear!
I think it can be helpful to also rethink what being productive really means. To say that a certain behavior is productive presupposes that we already know what constitutes a desirable or undesirable outcome. This works well when we're tackling problems with known solutions, and whose outcomes are fairly predictable: if I answer this email then I'll keep my team happy, or if I agree to join another meeting then I'll be seen as a team player. But what if we don't know what a good outcome should look like? What if the odds of failure far outweigh the odds of success? If my book draft is only accepted on the 10th submission, were the previous 9 attempts "unproductive" despite the learning and experience that made the final success possible? If I set aside time to catch up with my family only to end up enduring through awkward conversations, have I spent my time "unproductively" even though such conversations actually give me the chance to work through unresolved conflicts and misunderstandings? New behaviors are by definition exploratory, so we need to readjust our definition of productivity accordingly to also celebrate learning, experimentation, and even failures as valuable outcomes. This is something that I still have to relearn again and again every time I try something new.