How to Stop Bad Habits | What are Friction Points?
Learn how creating “Friction Points” can help stop your bad habits!
The idea of someone wanting to stop a bad habit is not anything new and I am sure we could all name a few bad habits we have that we might want to stop, but as we all know — stopping a bad habit is much easier said than done. Because there are so many different bad habits you could have like smoking, or eating too much junk food, I can’t give you a “be-all-end-all” solution, but I can give you something better and it’s a framework or a process you can use in literally any situation, to overcome any bad habit.
The process of stopping your bad habits comes from creating something called a friction point.
You probably recognize the word friction from your high school physics class or somewhere else, but essentially it means a resistance force. Surfaces like ice, or wearing socks on a wooden floor are a few examples of things that have very little friction and something like rubber has a lot of friction. In terms of stopping bad habits, these scientific principles have nothing to do with it, but they are examples of what we need to do.
If we are trying to establish a good habit, we want it to be as easy as possible. This looks like me setting my clothes out the night before I want to do an early morning workout, so that I can wake up, roll out of bed, and jump into my workout gear right away instead of waking up, trying to decide what I am going to wear that day and then rolling over and going back to sleep.
If we are trying to stop bad habits, we want it to be as difficult as possible to do the habit, but what does that look like? Because these things we want to stop are bad habits, we are going to put friction points in place that inhibit, or stop the habit, by causing “high friction”.
You might be trying to correct a minor bad habit like eating too much dessert after supper. A few examples of creating friction points that could stop this habit would be to store those cookies, or cheesecake in another room away from where you eat, or maybe you would commit to not buying any dessert for a month. This way, if you wanted to eat dessert, you would have to finish supper and then go to the store to buy it, before coming home to eat it. By doing this, you will have created friction with the goal of stopping your bad habit.
A bad habit that might be larger, or more severe, can also be solved using this process, but you might need to add multiple friction points to stop it. I know that some people who struggle with an addiction to video games have taken steps to inhibit that habit. They might place the TV remote in their bedroom, and take the batteries and put it in their bathroom. They could then place the Xbox, Playstation, or gaming console in their closet and then take the power cord and put them in their basement. So, after increasing the amount of friction, it becomes harder and harder for you to continue the habit, and if you end up choosing to play video games, you need to go through a big setup to make that happen where you are consciously choosing to do it.
So far I have only shown you the details of how to overcome bad habits through your own willpower and logic, but sometimes you need to step things up a notch and that’s when you need a little help…
One of the things that might help you is something like the Kitchen Safe: Time Locking Container.
It is a time-locking safe that really increases the friction. It is really simple and very effective if you choose to use it! The safe was created by someone who was always finding themselves eating too many cookies and they wanted to do something to stop it. Eventually they created the kSafe and people all over the world has been using it to lose weight, quit smoking, beat drug addiction and alcohol dependency and break many other bad habits.
These examples I’ve given you may or may not be habits that you struggle with, but I hope they illustrate how you can use friction points to overcome bad habits and I have left a link below for the kSafe if you want to learn more about it. I think it’s a really neat product that is helping people break their bad habits, so it might be for you or someone you know!
Click here to get a kSafe Time Locking Container of your own, or watch the full video on our YouTube Channel.
