The Habit Reframe Method

A smarter approach to ending bad habits while starting-up on new good

ones.

By Simon D. (u/noshittysubreddits on Reddit) ㋛

Version 1.11 – May 2022

Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional. This method was developed through basic
research and years of personal trial and error. This in no way should be seen as an alternative to
seeking help, which by the way, is something I wholeheartedly encourage if you’re struggling in
any way.
Part 1: The problem

Bad habits. Compulsive behaviors. Out of control bingeing.

Apathy and lethargy. A lack of drive, motivation and consistency.

Procrastination.

These issues we all face, almost always come down to two things :

(1) Runaway positive feedback loops causing regrettable time wasting.

(2) Experiences that tells our antiquated brains to suppress motivation.

Let's first unpack (1) as it explains what is happening when you procrastinate. Then we'll move
on to (2) as it explains more of why this process starts in the first place. From there we can
proceed to a fix; to a solution.

So, imagine you’re at your desk, doing some work on a project. It's going fine, when, of course,
you get the idea to take a break. You tell yourself: two minutes. Two minutes to check what’s
new on Reddit, and then it's right back to work.

Two minutes soon turns to 15.

Fine. It happens. Let's pause the tape right there.

If that was the end of it; if you thought, hey it’s ok, that was an interesting post, it was worth
the extended time, but now let’s get back to work, it wouldn’t be a big deal.

But that's not what happens.

Instead, you give in to an impulse to check Instagram—just for a second—which leads to a full
hour wasted.

Why did that happen? Why does that sort of thing always happen?

To answer, we’ll need to rewind this mental movie and take a closer look in slow-mo.

So, there you are scrolling through Reddit when, okay, it hits you that you're wasting time and
so you surface to the present moment. You look up and away from your phone. There. Pause
the tape.

It's subtle as heck and easy to miss, but in that crucial moment… you felt bad.

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You felt…what? Maybe it was a little prick of, well, guilt maybe? Could have been the guilt you'd
get from realizing you just broke the promise you made to yourself to have a distraction-free
work session. Or maybe you felt irked and irritated because, well, fun time was now over, and
you had to get back to your tedious work. Hard to tell, but whatever it was, it was simply
unpleasant.

Now, you'd think that this negative emotion would compel you to get the heck back to work.
Like how the pain of a burn would cause you to avoid touching a hot stovetop again, the pain of
wasting time should compel you to, well, stop wasting time.

But that's not what happens. In fact, the opposite happens.

And it makes perfect sense.

You see, for you, browsing the internet is your vice. The thing about vice is that—sure they
entertain, and sure they can be gratifying—but more than anything else, your vices are
amazing at relieving bad feelings.

Maybe that’s an odd thing to contemplate and accept, so let’s fast-forward another hour and
see the vice thing in action again.

Here you are flicking through Instagram, when you surface again. This time you throw your
phone at the couch in anger. With the deadline looming, you think now I’m legit behind and
even screwed.

With the swelling pressure, cortisol will flood your brain resulting in stress and anxiety, all of
which is extremely unpleasant.

And with that, a natural and intense urge and compulsion to do something, anything, to make
the deadly threat go away quickly will take over.

This isn’t because you’re a bad person or broken or somehow deficient. On the contrary. This is
your survival instinct kicking-in when it senses a threat. Stress and anxiety caused by something
external can only mean your life is at risk—and the long way to eliminate the threat simply
won’t do. Too urgent, too risky; you could die. It’s gotta be quickest path to relief.

And guess what? The stuff that can deliver just the right kind of relief, happens to be right there
lying on the couch.

It's entirely messed up, right? What’s causing the bad feelings—what's behind the guilt, the
stress, the anxiety; what's maybe even behind some of the shame, depression, and regret that
weaves in and out of your life—is also the thing that's unbelievably effective at instantly
relieving all those bad feelings.

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This is what’s physically programmed in the deepest recesses of your brain. No amount of
inspirations or pacts with yourself or whatever will be able to override this emotional response
(but I didn’t need to tell you that…).

Naturally it becomes a vicious cycle. A runaway positive feedback loop. You feel bad, your vice
relieves the bad feeling, but it eventually makes you feel worse, then more vice for relief, which
stresses you even more, so more cravings and more compulsions and so on. As is the case with
addictions, the drug both cures and causes the disease.

+-+-+

Onto (2): about motivation and the stuff that kills it.

In the above narrative, I had you first imagine yourself sitting there being productive with some
work. But maybe even that requires a stretch of the imagination, as being productive and
motivated in any measure is hard to come by these days.

So, what’s going on?

Why do we often (always?) lack energy, drive, enthusiasm, motivation—not just for our school
or job obligations—but also (and often especially) for the things we care deeply about, like a
fun creative project or a clever business idea?

Why do we get that ‘ugh, I just don't feel like it’ feeling every damn time we sit down to do
some work—work we know is actually meaningful, fulfilling and could add so much
amazingness to our lives?

What is the source of your issues lack of motivation and consistency? The root cause of that
dreaded ‘ugh, I just don’t feel like it’ feeling?

You see, we evolved in an environment where energy was extremely scarce.

Think of the last time you spent time out in wilderness. Imagine being back there, but with no
phone, no water bottle or granola bar in your bag, no path leading back to civilization with its
grocery stores, restaurants, and stocked fridges. You could walk for hours without finding any
trace of edible plants, while the effort of trapping a fidgety animal would just barely make it
worth the energy.

You probably wouldn’t survive. Not just because you’re now a doughy-soft city dweller, but
because it’s ridiculously hard for any human to survive in the wild. Starvation, predation,

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infection is the rule, survival the exception. It makes sense that, close-up, every squirrel you see
seems pent up on meth, ready to scratch your eyes out if you dare reach for it.

All that to say, needless wastes of energy would have killed off our ancestors. So, we evolved to
never be motivated; to never want to expend energy unless you absolutely had to. Unless your
survival was at stake.

It makes sense. A lion is not propelled to go after a herd of aggressive gazelles if he literally just
ate a giant zebra steak. An elephant is not motivated to walk for hours to find a good source of
water and plants if her belly is already full. These animals know it’s time to rest, to restore, to
chill.

In the same way, what do you think happens when you spend the entire afternoon engaging
with your bad habits: eating junk food, watching TV, playing video games, watching porn,
browsing Reddit and other social media sites... consuming all sorts of vices and experiencing all
sorts of dopamine fueled rewards. What message is being sent to the old survival part of your
brain1?

The human attached to you is full. They’re well fed (high caloric junk food).
They just socialized (Instagram, TikTok), and mated (porn) with a ton of high
status and attractive people. They just had a thrilling adventure where they
overcame obstacles and adversaries (video games), followed by a dramatic
experience which resulted a new long-term mate (Netflix). They are also part
of a big, safe, unified group that shares a world view (Reddit, Twitter)... This
human is surviving exceptionally well—the proof is right there in the firehose
of rewards they just felt.

Whatever they just did this afternoon, whatever energy was used or risks were
taken, it must have been friggen enormous, but it all worked out exceptionally
well.

But the human can stop. For now, they can just stop. We're good.

As a result of this messaging, the old survival part of your brain will squash any request sent
from your conscious mind2 to use up energy for some imagined distant goal. This is especially
the case when your mind makes requests to use mental energy (i.e. to work on your thesis or
do something creative), which is very demanding in terms of energy-use.

1
Aka the limbic system.
2
Aka the pre-frontal cortex, or PFC

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Think about it. Why should the survival and energy conserving part of your brain let you work?
All the survival boxes are ticked, which could only mean one thing: you just expended a metric
ton of energy.

It’s time to shut down and relax. It’s time to do nothing.

So that’s where that urge to chill, to not work comes from. That’s the source of that ‘ugh, I just
don’t feel like it’ feeling that comes to haunt you at the worst possible moment3. That explains
why, after browsing Reddit for an hour, just the thought of opening a word document to
write—as you promised you would—feels so grueling and unappealing.

Your antiquated brain is convinced you’re about to waste energy. And wasting energy is about
as pointlessly senseless and dangerous as say walking towards the edge of a cliff.

So, just as your brain summons an insurmountable urge to back the heck away from the edge,
your brain summons insurmountable resistance to back you the heck away from the mental
work. And so, you do.

3
Also know as Resistance, as described by Steven Pressfield in his book “The War of Art”.

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Part 2: The Solution

The take-away lesson from the (1) narrative is to just not check your phone on that initial urge.
Avoid entering that runaway feedback loop using willpower or something.

I don't know about you, but that's not particularly helpful.

As it stands, you could be lectured all day about this terrible, life-goals-gobbling, ‘runaway
feedback loop’ monster thing living under your bed. You could stand on a table and proclaim to
the world that you’ll never go on Reddit ever again—not even for a second.

But still, you will forget. You will eventually rationalize checking your phone for a minute as a
reward or break. It’s utterly inevitable.

Similarly, the take-away from (2) comes down to this: “so you want never-ending motivation to
achieve your dreams? Just stop wasting time on your reward dosing vices, dummy…”

This is advice is quite patronizing. Obviously, we know that the solution to procrastination is to
not waste time and do the work. We know the solution to addiction is to just stop.

But it’s not that simple.

If only it were. Sigh…

So then, what is the solution? How do we break bad habits? How do we stop doing all the
gratifying and addictive things we now know inevitably lead to regret, pain and a soul crushing
lack of motivation—not to mention wasted dreams and a wasted life?

The answer is simple—but making this happen won’t happen overnight. It’s not a linear
process.

You have to drive desires down. You have to target the parts of your brain responsible for you
desiring your vices, and take direct concerted action to undo that ingrained mental
programming.4

Almost no other ‘method’ does this. In fact, they do the opposite: they drive desires up while
expecting you to keep resisting with self-control, willpower, affirmations, or by using some
fancy app or productivity hack.

4
I take no credit for this premise. Oddly, I got this idea from the book “The Easyway to Stop Smoking” by Allen
Carr. I say ‘oddly’ because I’m not and was never a smoker—it’s just an insightful book, worthy of all the hype.

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Think about it.

Think about the last time you tried to quit with a conventional method. Say you made an oath
with yourself after reading an inspiring self-help book. The first few days sucked, right? You had
to deal with urges and cravings using self-control.

It was an uncomfortable, perhaps unbearable mess—like trying to bar yourself from scratching
a throbbing mosquito bite, all while the ultra-marathon-running-ex-navy-seal author was yelling
in your ear c’mon man, shut up and just don’t do it!

Outside the habit, life continued to swing from demanding and stressful, to routine and boring.
But now…? Relief was denied.

You were no longer allowed to grab at your phone for a little innocent distraction. Social media
was off limits, along with video games. You had to just sit there and take it. It felt like an awful,
pleasureless, annoying existence; a prison of continual self-monitoring and restraint.

And so, you couldn’t help but daydream about the little innocuous things that would give you a
break from it all.

Your thoughts would inevitably arrive at :

Is this what my life will be like now? Is this how it's going to feel? This feeling…
this... sucks. You know, maybe don't want to quit after all.

But still, perhaps that post-it note you tacked on the bottom of your computer screen reminded
you to power through with grit and determination. C’mon man just effing do it.

The misery could be endured, the cravings resisted, the thoughts ignored.

Problem is—with those thoughts endlessly pestering you, plus life delivering its usual gauntlet
of stress, boredom, and other bad feelings—the desire for your vices only went up with time,
not down.

As you might recall from Part 1, vices are amazing at providing relief from bad feelings. It makes
sense that the pain and exhaustion of resisting results in ever intensifying cravings for relief.

To make it beyond day 1, then day 2, then day 3, then day 573... you need to have more and
more and more of an ability to resist.

Eventually... you gave in. No one (but that navy-seal author) has a limitless supply of willpower.
All it took was a convenient little rationalization to present itself:

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Bah, 5 minutes on Reddit won’t kill me. In fact, it might make me less grumpy and fidgety, thus
more productive.

And with that taste, the dopamine fueled hit—the feeling of blissful relief—felt better than
ever. This further solidified in your mind (literally, through the insulation of neural pathways)
that your vices are wonderful, life-saving, beneficial things, and that life without them is not
worth living. Also, what the heck was I thinking, anyway?!?

+-+-+

Here’s the reality: every time you try to quit, you end up driving up the desires you have for
your bad habits. You end up deepening your addiction5.

You need to do the opposite. You need to do what it takes to drive desires down with time, not
up.

Your ability to resist—your self-control, your willpower—it is what it is and there’s not much
you can do6. The desire side of things—what truly prompts cravings and drives addictive
behaviors and compulsions—that can be manipulated to your advantage over time. The key is
to gnaw away at the mental wiring so that one day you’ll be like:

Yeah, I see my phone there chiming with all it's easy titillation and
gratification... but, eh, I'm good. I think I’ll pass. I’d rather just get to work.

No willpower needed.

+-+-+

That, my friend, is the promised land. That's the mental re-programming—the “habit-reframe”,
if you will—that needs to happen in your life.

The problem is not your willpower or self-control. The problem is your innate desire for all
these hyper addictive modern vices. You need to drive desires down—not through learning a
bunch of theory (you can’t think-out desires), but through a focused day-to-day action plan.

That’s up next.

5
I use the word “addiction” deliberately as I believe this is what we’re dealing with when it comes to our learned
media habits. A great unpacking of the word can be found in the book “The Biology of Desire” by Marc Lewis.

6
This is despite the things people say will increase willpower—meditation, exercise and eating well—because they
themselves require willpower to do. So you need willpower to get more willpower. Not saying those things aren’t
good and useful, I’m just saying it’s a catch-22 that we can’t rely on.

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The Habit Reframe Method

Without further ramblings, I’ll present what I call the “Habit Reframe Method”.

I find it’s most easily broken down and explained visually, using a graph of what the process
might look like for you over time. See the diagrams on the next page—but of course understand
that the trends are qualitative, and your own path and results will vary.

In each graph, the x-axis is time, for both we have several weeks, and the y-axis is some
quantity of how often you indulge in your bad habits. The latter is a subjective scale, so you
could define a meaning for each of the three zones (moderation, excessive, bingeing) for you as
you see fit.

If we look at your past (Figure 1), we see your typical vice consumption fluctuations during the
(1) period. These often hover in and over excessive territory. You have your goods days and
your bad days.

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Figure 1 A rough sketch of what your life tends to look like in terms of how often you indulge in your vices.
 Link tp graph

Figure 2 Same sketch, looking at your vice consumption trends, but after applying the Habit Reframe Method.

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We can also see your past failed attempts at self-control. During the (2) period you tried
moderating for a few days, but you gradually faltered which led to a harsh binge. At (3) you
tried weening off your vices, which again, ultimately failed—and when you fail on your self-
control efforts, you often spend a few days bingeing on your vices, as shown with (4).

Anyway, that was then. Let’s look forward and see what pattern you can expect by applying the
Habit Reframe Method.

The first thing to notice is its overall jigsaw pattern. Each tooth, each cycle, I call an ‘iteration’.

So, off the bat,

1. The Habit Reframe Method uses an iterative approach.

This isn’t some 14-day program where you do X and Y to get you to the Z result. Those
programs always feel promising, but in reality you do X a few times, Y is too hard or
cumbersome, then the whole thing fizzles out. If you don’t get to Z, it’s your fault; not the
magical one-size-fits-all system.

Instead of a straight linear system, the iterative approach of the Habit Reframe Method means
you do something for a while, you fail, you gain some lessons, then you try again with some
tweaks.

There’s no time limit. There’s not even the ambition or expectation of some end goal of
perfection—some fantasy result where you’ll one day have consumed your vice for the very last
time, and from then on you’ll be flawless in your lifestyle and productivity.

Let that go.

In fact, I urge you to let go of keeping count of streaks (i.e. days in a row without engaging in a
particular vice).

Remember, the point of the method is to come to a point where you’re ambivalent towards
your vice. Would someone who shrugs and goes “meh” at the sight of the TikTok app, care to
mark a big X on a calendar, confirming she made it another day? Probably not.

+-+-+
The aim of this method, as in what we want to see roughly over time, is illustrated by the
arrows of (5) and (6) and the downwards trend of (7).

Link to graphs – you’re on page 14.

That is the overall goal: a gradual widening of the iterations, with more and more time spent
where you are consuming your vices in moderation territory or below… and… a gradual drop in
the intensity and time spent in binge or excessive territory when you slip and things spiral away
from you.

Eventually you will get to an iteration that spans several days, or even weeks (or more), but this
may take several tries and lots of time, months or longer for most, and that’s perfectly OK.

What’s important is the overall trend. We want—overall, on average—for each iteration to get
a bit wider than the ones before, for the ‘failures’ to not be so bad each time, and for you to be
able to pick yourself back up and start-over faster.

+-+-+

Let’s look at a single iteration (5) in detail; see what it’s composed of.

2. Each iteration starts with you going Cold-Turkey* on your vices.

That’s Cold-turkey but with a little asterisk (*), which I’ll explain in a second.

The “Cold-turkey” part means what you think it means.

You must resolve to cut out all your vices then and forever with zero exceptions. This is black
and white, and unambiguous by design. There are no baby steps, no weaning off, no cheat days
or rewards. None of that.

I’m making your life easy here. There’s nothing to plan for, or measure and keep track of. There
is no uncertainty in this; nothing to judge or decide as you go. The next time you’re confronted
with your vice, the answer is an automatic no.

This hard rule is your guiding light as you traverse the treacherous sea of ending your deeply
ingrained habits and automatic compulsions. The asterisk adds a bit of nuance to this, but your
success here is entirely contingent on you understanding, acknowledging, and accepting that
you need to cut it all out cold to end your bad habits.

Got it?

Good.

The asterisk part is the missing and crucial touch that makes going “cold-turkey” work in the
long run.

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First, it allows for what I call R&Cs, or “Rare and Circumstantials”. These are small and planned
moments where you permit yourself to, say, check Instagram or watch a show—but they
require a predefined set of circumstances.

For example, late night Netflix with your significant other could be OK for you.

That’s ‘rare’ because it happens once a day, and ‘circumstantial’ because it requires the
circumstance of you being with your girlfriend during the evening.

Another example could be 15 minutes to check the news over a morning coffee. The
circumstance is the morning, and you can use a screen-time blocker to keep it contained.

This is illustrated by the gap between the zero consumption line and the bottom of the
curve (8).

Link to graphs – you’re on page 15.

Second, and this is more important, the asterisk recognizes and anticipates that you’re going to
fail.

You’re going to forget or you’ll change your mind. You’re going to slip a little, then a lot. Or
perhaps your ‘R&Cs’ will devolve into something neither rare nor circumstantial.

Which brings us to the most important part of the method:

3. A gradual uptick in indulging and the eventual unraveling is both inevitable and okay.

At the end of the day, this is just me, internet guy with an awkwardly inappropriate Reddit
username7, writing to you in a free PDF with overused italics.

I could continue to yammer away for days about why going Cold-Turkey* is the only way to go. I
could put together amazingly poetic and inspirational quotes that get you amped up and
primed to leave it all behind!! and crush it in life!!

And on your side, you can agree wholeheartedly with everything I’m saying. You could be
pumped and excited or be stern and resolute. No turning back.

But that sentiment and passion will fade.

7
That I wish I could change… I made it, if you’re curious, back when Reddit’s homepage started defaulting
annoying subreddits like r/atheist and r/politics. Hence the “no shitty subreddits”.

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At some point you will indulge on something with a neat excuse. You’ll tell yourself you can
keep it under control…

Bah this little thing can qualify as a new R&C. C’mon, no need to be all anal about it.

And with that, the gradual increase in how often you indulge, is inevitable (shown as (9)). It’s in
your evolved biology as discussed earlier. You’re made to seek and grab at easy rewards
because at one point your survival depended on it.

The fact is, having a taste of pleasure leads to wanting more of it, not less. Before long, it will
snowball out of control in that feedback loop, and you’ll windup back in the familiar land of
excessive indulging—if not flat-out bingeing.

I used to get mad at that.

I used to berate myself for being so inconsistent with my values, beliefs and convictions.

Everything changed when I realized there is nothing to get upset about. It’s human nature, and
utterly inevitable.

Faltering is, and forever will be, as sure as clockwork and understandable as, say, mindlessly
scratching a mosquito bite when you promised you’d stop. So, it’s baked right into the method.

What’s important though, is, well, two things. The first is to leverage what you can from those
failings using the practice I’ll explain in the next section. The second is to learn and adapt.
Which brings us to:

4. Compassionate self-discovery through failure is key.

“Don’t get mad, get data”.

This is a mantra I like to repeat to myself when I falter.

I suggest you say it 10 times out loud now to help burn it into your memory.

Rather than getting all upset and self-critical when you fail, get the data.

Learn what were the conditions that lead to things getting out of control.

What rationalizations did you use?

What life experiences, triggers, circumstances or emotions prompted the excuses? (remember,
we use our vices to relieve bad feelings)

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What were the R&Cs that perhaps just cannot be maintained as rare and circumstantial?

What are the flaws in the process you use to start a work-session? What can be improved?
What can make it fail-safe?

Adapt with each iteration based on what you’ve observed and learned. This may result in you
gradually decreasing the initial R&C set point for some vices, as shown with (8). For others,
sticking to a strict zero is the only way it can go.

Link to graphs – you’re on page 17.

At this point, I have a good understanding of what can be moderated and what simply cannot.
Yet, I only established all this after a great many iterations.

So don’t come to any conclusions because I said so; get to what works because your experience
has led you there. Establish it with cold, hard, undeniable data.

Then, when you slip, after taking note of the lessons learned, start over with a fresh iteration.
Go Cold-Turkey* once again.

Repeat the whole cycle as necessary.

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The art of Pinning

Though the above framework is patently better than anything you’ve tried—mostly because it
insists on you becoming kinder and more compassionate with yourself when you falter, and
patient with a process that simply isn’t linear—it’s still incomplete.

Think of the graph as a skeleton. It needs meat to connect everything together and bring it to
life. It needs a deliberate practice that can be applied through all phases of the model: starting
with your first iteration, through to when things derail and you transition onto the next
iteration.

And this practice must serve but one function.

To manipulate desires: to erode the desires you have for your bad habits, plus slowly cultivate
desires for better habits and behaviors.

I call the practice “pinning”.

To explain how it works, I need to first ask you a few questions:

What happens when you waste several hours screwing around on the internet instead of
working on an assignment? What happens after you binge watch an entire season of Brooklyn
Nine-Nine?8 What happens when you realize that you have broken, yet again, the promises you
made to yourself?

You feel… bad, right?

On the other hand, what happens when you have a productive day and you wind up crossing
out several tasks off a to-do list? What happens when you plan for an intense workout and you
manage to follow through?

Of course, you feel good.

The key to the “pinning” practice of the Habit Reframe Method is to never allow those feelings,
good or bad, go to waste.

To explain what that means and how it’s done, we need to talk a little about the brain.

When it comes to making executive decisions, your brain likes to use shortcuts.

8
Other than getting that stupid intro song stuck in your head.

18
Rather than using a great deal of computation energy every time it is confronted with a choice
(as in, is this particular action a good thing worth doing… or a bad thing to avoid?), the brain
will search in its memory for past emotions associated with the action. It will then make a quick
snap decision and compel you to act accordingly9.

For example, you may have touched a hot stovetop when you were a child.

That specific action resulted an intense, painful sensation. That experience and its resulting
emotions were then hardwired in the memory part of your brain. So, now when you see a hot
stovetop, you reflexively avoid it without thinking.

I like to say that the action of touching a hot stove is “pinned” with a very bad sensation. That
“pin” is so thoroughly lodged—touching a stove is so utterly associated with pain—that you no
longer desire touching it at all. In fact, you reflexively avoid it.

Consider your tech vices.

They’ve made you feel good right? They’ve had you laugh, entertained, or gratified. They’ve
also relaxed and distracted you from stress and other bad feelings.

So, after years of these pleasurable sensations and experiences, these vices are now “pinned”
somewhere in your brain with a metric-ton of positive emotions. Your desire for them is thus
extremely high, hence:

 The urges can be intense and all-consuming.

 It can be far too easy to rationalize.
 You’ll often find yourself just doing it out of a mindless compulsion.
 It's become seemingly impossible to keep the resolutions and promises to moderate your
consumption.

What can we do about that? Logically, we need to start pinning bad emotions or sensations to
your vices.

The good thing is—and “good” is a relative term here—after we've indulged in our vices, and
especially after we’ve taken it too far, there’s often a moment or two when we feel less than
pleasant.

It can be this weird emptiness or ill feeling.

9
If I remember my pop-psychology books right, this all happens in the hippocampus. Books like “The Hacking of
the American Mind” by Dr. Robert Lustig and “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman explore this topic in
greater (and fascinating) detail.

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Perhaps it's the anxiety, panic, or stress that crops up after procrastinating on something
important.

Or maybe it’s the guilt, regret and pain from wasting the time you carved out to pursue a
creative dream.

I even count the bloated and queasy feeling you get after binging on junk food.

When unpleasant stuff like that happens, what gets pinned on your brain’s circuitry as
associated with those bad feelings? It’s the vice, right? Wasting time on the internet led to a
bad feeling; therefore, ‘the internet’ gets pinned with that a bad feeling, no?

Surprisingly, no it doesn't. The vice doesn't get the blame. The junk food and their chemicals
don’t get the blame.

You do.

You get blamed for the apparent failure and its consequences.

The ‘you’ I’m talking about is your self-image. The person you think of when you consider who
you are.

I mean, just think of your mental chatter that accompanies the bad feelings:

I faltered. I lack discipline. I am pathetic. I am a slob. I am wasting time and wasting away my
life. There’s no one and nothing to blame but me...

As a result, the bad feelings get “pinned” to your self-image. That could explain (at least in part)
your worn-down self-esteem and maybe some of your depression, self-contempt or apathy.

Meanwhile, because the vice has been so dang reliable at providing gratuitous distraction and
pleasure, and because it can even relieve all forms of bad feelings, the vice continues to get
pinned with nothing but lovely positive emotions in your brain’s circuitry.

This whole process obviously needs to end.

If you’re going to feel bad, and if it’s going to hurt, then you may as well leverage those bad
feelings to your advantage. You might as well not waste them.

You need to reprocess those feelings, so they get pinned, not to your self-image, but to the vice
itself.

20
To do that, you need to start by observing and being mindful10 of the bad feelings.

When they occur, you need to stop and really take them into your attention. You need to
“look” at them, like they’re tangible things separate from you.

Next, you need to consciously or mindfully associate, or “pin” those feelings with what caused
it, as in with the vice.

There’s no direct or easy way to do this; every person will do something different.

For example, if I waste an entire evening on Reddit and get a pang of regret, I will physically get
up, focus my attention on the sinking feeling for a few seconds, then I’ll allow myself to get
heated while physically pointing directly at the screen and list of links.

Then I’ll say to myself

This damn thing… this website… this is what’s causing this pain right here.

I’ll use whatever mental faculty I can control to make sure that I remember the moment and
the association I just observed.

What’s important here is that you’re being honest. I’m not asking you to play mind games or
recite affirmations that clearly are fabrications or mental gymnastics.

There is a direct cause and effect phenomenon occurring: you over-indulge in your vice,
and then you feel bad. It’s time to program your brain with the truth about exactly what causes
your failings and suffering.

Never let a bad feeling go to waste.

10
Mindfulness is a key concept in all this. I encourage you to look more into it if you’re not too familiar. A great
book I always recommend is “The Mindful Way through Depression” by Mark Williams. If you end up getting CBT
type therapy, chances are you’ll be encouraged to develop a mindfulness practice, as was the case for me.

21
Pinning in Practice

Ok. Let’s wrap this up by going back to the Habit Reframe Method and seeing exactly where
you can do some solid "pinning" with the dual goals of reducing desires for your vices and
increasing desires for good habits and behaviors.

1. Pin during your first Cold-Turkey* period.

With a fresh start on the road to freedom, you’re bound to have small wins; to feel proud of
yourself or optimistic about the future.

Prove it to yourself using real emotions. Seek the inner evidence that you absolutely can and
will enjoy life without your little “pleasures”.

Life without them doesn’t have to be a grind as it was before. Grab the proof of good feelings
and pin it.

Honestly, it’s amazing (and quite unexpected, really) how much wonder and joy percolates into
your life once you give your brain a break from incessant loops of wanting and getting. It might
not happen right away at first, and if it does, it might go away or wax and wane, but either way,
just be there for the experience.

As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. It’ll be worth whatever discomfort
you experience the first few days and weeks x100.

Any small wins, any benefits you get, anything you can point to, it can all be pinned to living a
life without your vices.

2. Pinning to cultivate good habits.

Much of the focus of this method has been on ending negative habits, but I’ll say a few words
on starting up on positive habits and behaviors.

The goal is simple: to cultivate motivation; to cultivate desire for those good actions.

The general idea is the same as with bad habits, but in reverse. You want to come to a place
where you just feel like doing these things naturally, so the use of willpower or self-control (or
tricks and hacks) is not necessary.

Just as with bad habits where you 'pin' bad feelings, with good habits you want to 'pin' good
feelings.

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Say you have a productive work session, and you feel pleased at the end. Well, be mindful of
that goodness and 'pin' it to the act of working.

Say you crush it with a workout and you feel boosted and satisfied. Maybe you get that
“runner’s high”, “yogi’s bliss” or the “lifter’s-bicep-kissing-confidence11”. Great. Again, pin that
goodness to the actions or activity that caused it.

+-+-+

What I learned works best is this: instant Cold-Turkey style cutting for bad habits, but gradual
and easy with good habits, work sessions, and healthy behaviors.

You never want to force yourself to do something. If it takes a week after you go Cold-Turkey
for you to feel like doing a single push-up... so be it.

If it takes another day or two or ten for you to pick-up the dusty guitar or work on a long-
neglected project, that's ok too.

There’s even a popular method out there that starts by making you floss a single tooth every
day. This is fine.

Never force it.

Forcing it is unpleasant. So it might work in the short-term, but it also means you’re
inadvertently 'pinning' bad feelings to the action.

Just be patient and the desire will come. If you think back to part 1 (‘The Problem’), my
argument was that our vices kill our desires and motivation to do meaningful work.

Well... if you end your vices—and that really should be your single and sacred priority here—
and if you allow enough time to pass, your brain will slowly open to the idea of work.

Motivation will trickle in, in patches at first, here and there, but this process will accelerate as
you do the work in small doses and you 'pin' the resulting good emotions12 in a positive
feedback loop.

+-+-+

11
I say, the douchier, the better.
12
If good emotions happen to come; sometimes they don't. Just be mindful of what happens. Try not to expect it
or judge if it doesn’t happen.

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Going Cold-Turkey* will for sure leave you with a lot of spare time, especially at first. I often fill
that time with benign activities—what I call “neutrals”. For me, these are going for walks,
reading, cooking, doodling, cleaning, listening to music and podcasts, socializing.

I also do a lot of just sitting, thinking or, well, nothing. Doing nothing is quite underrated.
Especially when I sit down to do work and the motivation just isn’t there, I just sit and do
nothing. I look internally at the Resistance and the temptation to mess around, and I give it a
familial nod. Hello old friend. Thanks for stopping by, but today I don’t need you. And I wait.

The key is to just be patient, and as much as you can, be present to the moment and your
emotions. Time will go by, and who knows, out of sheer boredom you might find yourself
starting to tap at the keyboard.

3. Pinning during the hard times

All this stuff—talk of addiction, bad habits and compulsions—comes down to one thing:
ineffective management of negative feelings and emotions13.

At a young age, simply because it was accessible, we learned that we could distract or pacify
our bad feelings with stuff like food and electronics. Some people eventually turn to drugs or
alcohol, but in this day and age of instant and endless gratification in our pockets, it’s hardly
necessary.

So, if you cut out your vices, whatever they may be, you are going to have to confront some bad
feelings.

The good thing is, much of the negative feelings such as the guilt, stress and the regret of time
wasting, are caused by the vice themselves, so that goes away on its own rather quickly when
you end your vices.

But still, there may be underlying stress, pressure, fear, worry, sadness, regret etc. that you’ll
have to face without being able to distract or relieve away with vice.

It goes without saying that therapy could be essential for you to work through these, especially
if there’s trauma or persistent depression.

Either way, even with the best therapist or medication, there just won’t be a way around
confronting certain issues and getting familiar with your bad feelings using some form of

13
Nir Eyal talks about this in his book Indistractable. He uses the phrase “Time manage is pain management”
which I think is spot on.

24
present-moment awareness. In fact, the role of a mental-health professional will often be to
guide and support you through this potentially uncomfortable or painful but essential process.

I’ve been through this process (and it’s ongoing). Here is what I’ve found: if you learn to
manage your bad feelings properly, with a little time and luck, a little ray of happiness and
peace-of-mind just might find it’s way through a crack in your dark mental clouds.

4. Pin during the uptick period of each iteration.

As the days go on, and as you rationalize a little vice here and there, there will be plenty of bad
feelings to be had and felt as you come to regret it after the party’s over.

Just be mindful as best you can and compassionate with yourself when (not “if”) things get out
of hand. It’s fully expected and okay.

5. Pin during the binge phase.

You will feel negative emotions after over-indulging in your vices. Again, do what you can to be
mindful of whatever you feel and pin these emotions to your vices.

5) Pin as you reset into the next iteration and you go Cold-Turkey* once more.

Like explained earlier, take stock of what happened. Don’t get mad, get the data.

Adjust your routines, systems, process. Modify your R&Cs as needed.

Then, take in a deep breath, exhale out any inner resentment and gently and mindfully start
back up at step 1.

25
Part 3: The application

When it comes to taking in self-help advice and turning it into tangible long-term changes, what
matters more: stuff like how inspired, determined or goal-oriented you are OR the systems you
put in place to actually apply the method?

Chances are, you’ve already felt optimistic and energized after reading a self-help book; so you
already know that such things are great… but they’re never enough to have you reach your
goals.

Inspiration and excitement naturally fizzle out.

Optimism vanishes the second you have the tiniest of slip-up.

Plans, intentions and commitment simply get forgotten.

No. You need to install something external in your life, to ensure you’ll actually apply and
implement the internal insights.

You need a system.

As James Clear expertly puts it:

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

What truly counts—what makes stuff like this method stick—are the systems you put in place.

Systems are simply the things you do on a regular basis. They are the repeated processes. The
quiet routines. Your daily or weekly rituals. They also include the tools you use, the reminders
and prompts you set, as well as the mentors and community you surround yourself with.

Now, it goes beyond the scope of this eBook to get into details about what sort of system you
should implement—and honestly, all you need is a common sense starting point. The trial and
error nature of the method will lead you to what’s optimal for you through iteration.

Yet, what’s arguably more important than the contents of the system is how the system is
enforced.

Having something outside you—some support, positive peer pressure and accountability—can
be key if you find yourself forgetting or straying.

26
I've recognized this in myself and with others. I realized I needed a way to force you to stick
with the method—to hold you accountable, while also providing the support and feedback
you'll need as you come across the inevitable question and sticking point.

It's called the Group Accountability Program. It's totally free, runs for 30 days, and happens on
Discord. You can register here.

Here’s what Dylan, one of our past registrants, said about his progress:

Completely changed my life. It's actually kind of mind-blowing to think it's only been a
month. A month ago I was struggling with procrastination and addiction. I was actively
aware that the things I was doing were detrimental to my goals but it was like I didn't
care, I didn't have any discipline at all.

Now here I am being so productive I'm scheduling my days down to half an hour and can
really see my goals becoming more obtainable by the day. I've been through some shit
this past month but it's nice to finally be on the other side with insanely positive changes.
I sincerely thank Simon and Suket (the admin) for setting this up.

Here’s what Kanav G. said:

The weekly check in really helped me increasing awareness of my intention and my

progress towards it. I would recommend everyone to give it a try.
- more consistent w/ habits
- higher awareness of how I feel
- Intentional with digital inputs.
- Downgraded to basic phone, wasting time on phone dropped to zero
- Decluttering - got rid of stuff I was not using
- Better at taking breaks
- Calmer
- Better at realizing and managing stress

Finally, there’s Tanuja M.:

I definitely managed to reduce the impact of the vices, and that made me more
productive.

If you want to stop procrastinating and understand the reasons why you are
procrastinating in the first place, you definitely must attend this program (and read
everything Simon writes).

Register here ;)

27
What’s next?

Hit me up!

Shoot me some feedback, comments, suggestions, criticism... or let me know how your
progress is going.

I always want to make the Habit Reframe Method better. You can message me on Reddit
(u/noshittysubreddits), email me at [email protected].

Help spread the word.

I encourage you to talk about this method and share this PDF freely to your friends on Reddit,
elsewhere on social media and in the real world (just send ‘em the link: habitreframe.com).

Also, simply upvoting my Reddit posts, commenting and sharing makes a huge difference in
terms of getting more eyes on my stuff.

A final word

From time to time, I like to browse subreddits like r/selfhelp, r/DecidingToBeBetter,

r/getdisciplined and r/productivity.

Every time I’m there, I see good, honest people—people with big, amazing dreams; people who
want to become better versions of themselves and make the world a better place—post the
same sort of questions about self-control, habits, procrastination and self-improvement.

Then, there’s the countless lurkers (odds are, that includes you)… silently browsing these subs,
hoping to take in a little nugget of wisdom to help them on their own private journey.

I see a lot of pain, struggling and shame happening out there. I see it manifesting in people’s
attempts at coping through their vices, in their lack of motivation, and a slew of mental health
issues.

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I truly believe many of them could benefit immensely by taking in this simple message, as I
have: love yourself.

To love yourself, means you’re centering your personal development journey on self-
understanding, kindness, compassion, patience and mindfulness, rather than self-control,
willpower, force and resisting temptation.

I employ time management and productivity hacks and apps like anyone else, yet I’ve learned
through experience that it’s all useless until you learn to love and to be kind to yourself.

If I could deliver one message to the world—which I greatly need help spreading—it would be
this. Love Yourself.

Not because I’m a hippie or it sure feels nice, but because doing so is so dang useful. It’s
pragmatic.

Loving yourself = more mental clarity and peace. More peace = more sustained work and
productivity. More work = success and health in life.

Loving yourself causes self-improvement. And it’s not the other way around, i.e. that once you
become better you can finally love yourself, as so many people have come to assume.

To crush it in life, to make the world a better place, and to be happy… you must accept and
love yourself first. Period.

So, with that final message, it’s time for me to close this up. Much love to all of you, and thanks
again for reading.

Best wishes to you,

- Simon ㋛

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