How to break a bad habit

You also want to avoid the all-or-nothing mindset, which leads to quick burnout, and instead take micro-steps toward your goal, Marques says. If you stay up until midnight but want to be in bed at 10, the reasonable progression is: start with 11:45; the next night 11:30; the next 11:15 … It builds success and minimizes avoiding the new habit.

It also helps to remember that urges follow a cycle. They’re initially intense, then wane, and usually go away in about 20 minutes. Collier suggests setting a timer and focusing on “just getting through that.”

In that waiting period, seeking new sensations can provide useful distraction. You can go outside and feel the wind and smell the air. You can do something physical. Collier also likes using hot and cold. In the extreme, it’s submerging your face into a bowl of water, which can slow down your heart rate. But it could also be holding an ice cube or taking a hot shower. “You’re focused on the sensation and not the urge,” she says.

Accept that success isn’t a straight line

As you try to change, there will be bumps and setbacks, which are part of the process of lasting change. The problem is that we’re our own worst critics, and some people view anything except total success as complete failure.

Marques says to try to take a third-person perspective and think about how you’d react to a friend who said that having one bag of chips had ruined their whole diet. You’d be kind and reassuring, not critical, so give yourself the same treatment. A lot of the struggle with self-criticism is not seeing thoughts as facts, but merely thoughts. It takes practice, but it’s the same idea as with meditation. You treat what comes into your head as clouds, acknowledging them and letting them roll on through. “Everyone has distorted thoughts all the time,” Marques says. “It’s what you do with them.”

It also helps to reduce stress and minimize that sense of failure to know that the goal isn’t to make the old habit disappear, because it won’t. You’re just trying to strengthen the new routine so eventually it takes over, and the old habit isn’t even a thought. But it’s a constant process, made easier with self-compassion, because there’s no way to prepare for every situation or be able to predict when and where a trigger might happen.

“You can’t prepare for life,” Collier says. “Life is going to throw things at you.”

(Steve Calechman is a contributor to Harvard Health Publications.)