The Appreciative Living (AL) Habit Breaker Technique: Change Habits by Changing Beliefs

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from fighting yourself.

You tell yourself you won’t do it again.
You promise this time will be different.
You try to control it.
You resist it.
You beat yourself up over it.

And yet… it returns. Sugar, binging, doomscrolling, gaming, procrastinating, people-pleasing, worrying, staying up too late, checking the news again.

It can feel like an internal tug-of-war. And no matter how bad you want to stop, the urge eventually wins.

The Habit Breaker Technique was created for this moment. Rather than fighting the habit, it provides the tools to remove the internal fuel that keeps it alive.

The Core Insight: You Don’t Lack Discipline, You’re Brain is Confused

Within the Appreciative Living philosophy, behavior is never random. It follows from beliefs and patterns adopted throughout life to cope with experiences and traumas.

In other words, if you change your thinking, you change your beliefs, which then shifts your emotional state, behavior, identity, and ultimately your life experience. Thinking drives the bus.

When a behavior feels compulsive or resistant, it is being driven by underlying beliefs such as “this helps me feel safe, relaxed, relieved, or helps me cope or protects me.”

Beliefs like these cause your brain to repeat habits under the false pretense that these benefits serve you more than the costs they incur. The Habit Breaker Technique gets the brain to see this is not true, and once it does, it stops creating the physical urges and cravings. It feels like magic.

How can I experience the Habit Breaker Technique?

We just opened up a new discounted program where you can work with Jackie one-on-one to overcome your worst habit using this technique. Click the link below to learn more.

What Is the AL Habit Breaker Technique? A Coaching Tool for Stopping Bad Habits.

The Appreciative Living Habit Breaker Technique is a specific intervention designed to reduce compulsive habits, avoidant habits, emotionally driven behaviors, and resistance to positive change. It does this by altering the underlying belief patterns that drive urgency or avoidance.

It is a step-by-step coaching tool used to dismantle unwanted habits at the belief level. It is the flagship applied intervention within Step 2 of the overarching Rapid Change Process and sits within the Appreciative Living ecosystem as follows:

• Appreciative Living is the umbrella philosophy
• The Appreciative Mindset is the core thinking orientation
• The Rapid Change Process is the overarching transformation framework
• The Habit Breaker Technique is a core tool within Step 2 of the Rapid Change Process

It Is NOT Hypnosis, Therapy, or Willpower

The Habit Breaker Technique works on the subconscious level but it is not hypnosis, therapy, forced change, positive thinking denial, or “Just stop doing it.”

It does not rely on willpower, discipline or suppressing desire. It changes the subconscious beliefs driving the behavior which reduces the neurobiological mechanism causing the urge. This makes discipline minimal or even unnecessary.

It is a step-by-step coaching technique, where the coach asks questions and the client answers. It can also be done as a solitary exercise once the technique is understood, though not quite as effective as working with a coach.

What People Often Experience: Significant Craving Reduction

While results vary, common experiences include:

• Significantly reduced cravings and urges to do the behavior
• Increased sense of choice and presence
• Insights on the underlying causes of the behavior
• Feeling neutral around former triggers

While there are exceptions, the most common and surprising report is this: “I just don’t want to do it anymore.” This is what happens with belief-level change.

The Two Types of Habits It Addresses

The Habit Breaker Technique works with two kinds of habits:

1. Compulsive Habits

These are behaviors you “seek” or feel pulled toward doing such as sugar binging, screen overuse, news obsession, worry spirals, over-controlling, people pleasing, gaming, or staying up too late.

You feel compelled to act and your nervous system anticipates relief or reward by doing them. The drive is physical with your brain pumping out neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin to get you to act.

2. Avoidant Habits

These are behaviors you resist such as not exercising, procrastinating, avoiding conflict or difficult conversations, not starting meaningful projects, or putting off budgeting or organizing.

Avoidant habits feel threatening because your nervous system anticipates discomfort or failure in doing them. It pumps out a different set of neurochemicals like cortisol to make you avoid them rather than seek them.

In both cases, the behavior makes sense based on what your brain currently believes. There is nothing wrong with you or your brain. It just needs new information to do things differently.

The Appreciative Living Unwanted Habit Continuum

After working with a variety of people with unwanted habits, it became helpful to distinguish the increasing intensity or severity of the habits people faced. Five different levels were identified and named, and the following chart depicts the subjective experience of each.

This chart has been helpful for people to get a sense of where they are with the habit at the start, and to see where they progress after using the Habit Breaker Technique. While not meant to be a diagnostic tool, it is also another way for coaches and other helping professionals to assess when a client might be bridging into a need for therapy or expert medical help.  

Why Willpower Fails & the Habit Breaker Technique Works

Discipline and willpower work at the behavior level which is downstream of thinking. Thinking drives behavior, so if you don’t change your thinking, you will be fighting an uphill battle all the way. This is why so many attempts at change fail.

If the subconscious Reptile believes things like, “sugar brings me comfort, scrolling helps me decompress, procrastination protects me from failure, worry keeps me prepared,” then it will continue to try and make you act on your compulsive habit.

Trying to override the Reptile with Cortex discipline is a tough road that few master. Those who do have likely shifted their underlying beliefs at some point, because the Reptile is the stronger brain from an evolutionary standpoint.

The way to avoid willpower and discipline is to use the Habit Breaker Technique to get your Reptile to see that the bad habit is actually not working for you.

What Makes This Different? Everything. It’s the Complete Opposite of What We Typically Do

While the full process is taught in detail inside the Rapid Change Process, the mechanism for change includes four essential differences from mainstream approaches:

1. It Uses Appreciative Inquiry Instead of Problem Solving

The Cortex is naturally wired to address habit change from a problem-solving perspective. That means analyzing it, looking for the root causes, and forcing the Reptile to change. No one likes to be changed, especially when they were not allowed to input into the change, don’t agree with it, and are being forced.

So the Reptile digs in deeper to stand its ground. It can make the habit worse.

Using Appreciative Inquiry rather than problem solving is the complete opposite approach. It’s a Cortex questioning tool that invites the Reptile in and listens with rapt attention to what it thinks. Rather than ignoring the Reptile or viewing it as a problem to be fixed, it admires and values it as an intelligent, well-meaning part of the brain that is doing its best to serve you. It posits that every habit began as a solution that worked at one time.

Staying curious and open through Appreciative Inquiry allows the Reptile to feel safe and involved in exploring what it thinks rather than defending itself from being the problem.

2. It Changes Beliefs Rather Than Behavior.

When people want to stop a bad habit like nail biting, the first place they typically start is deciding what to DO. How will I stop this? Should I get some of that bad tasting stuff to put on my fingers? What do the experts say I should do? What else could I do instead of biting my nails? Who should I talk to?

This is backwards. As mentioned above, thinking and beliefs drive behavior. The place to begin is what the Reptile is thinking, not what you’re doing.

How does your Reptile believe nail biting is serving you? Does it reduce your anxiety? Make you feel safe?

Upon further inspection with the Habit Breaker Technique you’ll come to see the behavior is not serving you, and in fact, it creates the very problems you think it solves.

3. It Works with Feelings to Get to Thoughts

Most change efforts are Cortex-based. In other words, they use problem solving, analyzing, goal setting, and other analytical tools to try and change behavior. But the Reptile is a feeling brain that responds to emotional cues. In order to reach the Reptile and “speak its language,” the focus is on the feeling experience of the behavior. Feelings flow from beliefs, and this is the fastest way in to understanding the Reptile thinking and how best to work with it.  

4. It Unravels Limiting Beliefs Rather Than Trying to Forcibly Change Them.

Discipline and willpower are basically your Cortex trying to force your Reptile to stop doing something it doesn’t want to. Over time, the hope is that the Reptile will soften and it will get easier. This can happen but it takes a long time and is not usually successful.

Instead of forcing the Reptile to change its beliefs, the Habit Breaker Technique helps the Reptile come to the conclusion itself that it needs to change. There is no forcing or cajoling. The Cortex patiently asks more and more appreciative questions until it becomes plainly obvious to the Reptile this isn’t working. The belief basically unravels.

5. It Addresses Underlying Causes Rather Than Treating the Symptoms

Many habit change best practices focus on tracking behavior, removing triggers, increasing friction, modifying the environment, adding accountability, and creating reward systems. These can work, but you’re constantly fighting the urges and cravings of the Reptile.

The Habit Breaker Technique shifts the underlying drivers so these types of actions are much easier to do because there is little to no resistance from the Reptile. And they are not even needed in some cases. They are still relevant when trying to build a new positive habit, but not always required when stopping an unwanted behavior with the Habit Breaker Technique.

How Long Does the Change Last? It Depends

The Rapid Change Technique was created a year and a half ago so data is limited on how long the cravings stop. The short answer is that it depends on several factors.

1. Whether or not you address the underlying drivers of the habit

The technique surfaces underlying causes for doing the behavior such as overcoming feelings of loneliness, stress, boredom and more. The technique causes the urge to go away for a period of time, during which you often need to find a way to deal with the underlying cause. If you don’t, you can go back to the original habit over time, or may  substitute with another habit that might be better or worse.

This is where the larger Rapid Change Process comes in. It helps shift the underlying drivers such as feeling lonely, unworthy, unsafe, bored, and other experiences that cause you to escape into bad habits. This is why the Habit Breaker Technique is not a stand-alone tool, because you often need to address the underlying cause to break the habit for good.

2. How severe the habit was to begin with

There appears to be a correlation with the severity of the habit and how long results last. If you have a nuisance habit such as eating sugar in the afternoon because you want a little pick-me-up, our experience is that it is common for something like that to stop in a session or two.

Problematic habits like overindulging in sugar any time it’s around, and feeling like you can’t control yourself around it, may take a few sessions. Experience shows that results can last anywhere from several weeks to a year and a half (the technique is only a year and half old). The “successful” person may still overeat sugar on occasion, but not often, and not like before. It is comparable to dropping down to the “normal” or “nuisance” level on the habit behavior continuum.

Non-clinical compulsive habits masking deeper issues may take more sessions or may not last as long. A smoker of six years quit cold after just one session, but then went back four months later. The underlying drivers were never addressed.

We don’t have data for destructive habits as Appreciative Living is a coaching methodology. It is likely helpful in therapeutic settings which should be done by a medical professional.

3. How important it is to you to change.

Importance matters and you can’t fake it. Changing the habit can’t be something you feel like you SHOULD do, it needs to be something you really WANT to do.

This is tricky to explain because on the Reptile part of you never wants to change. But you need to have enough internal belief that it matters for it to work. Asking “why” you want to change this habit over and over is one way to get at how important it truly is.

Who It’s For

The Habit Breaker Technique is for reflective, growth-oriented adults who:

• Have tried to break habits before without success
• Are tired of fighting themselves
• Want sustainable change rather than forced suppression
• Are willing to examine their thinking honestly

It is especially helpful for:

• Sugar binging and cravings
• Screen and phone overuse
• News overwhelm and doomscrolling
• Compulsive gaming
• Procrastination
• People pleasing or dominating
• Avoidance patterns
• Resisting good habits

Interested in Getting Coached by Jackie with the Habit Breaker Technique?

Click below to learn about a brand new program where you can be coached by Jackie to stop your unwanted habit!

Frequently Asked Questions

How fast does it work? It depends.

First off, it may not work for everyone. As described above, it really depends on how severe the habit is, the underlying causes, and how much the person wants to change.

For nuisance habits it’s not unusual for the urge to go in just one session. Problematic habits sometimes go in a session or two depending on the underlying causes, while others can take several more. Compulsive habits can also sometimes go in just a session or two, but often take longer. Destructive habits have not been tested.

Does it work for everyone? No, but it has worked for the majority.

It has helped the majority of people we’ve worked with over the past year and a half, but the data is biased as we tend to work with reflective people who are open to change and familiar with Appreciative Living.

Do I still need to take action after the habit stops?

You may still need to address the underlying drivers, but it’s much easier to do this when the urges are gone. This is where the Rapid Change Process comes in which does require you to take action.

Is it safe for serious addiction?

Those with severe addiction or withdrawal risk should seek qualified professional support instead of using this technique. The Habit Breaker Technique is not a substitute for medical advice or clinical care and is not meant to treat, diagnose, or cure any medical condition.

Where can I go to learn more?

Pilots have been run on the Habit Breaker technique and more will be coming. Jackie is also looking for people to coach described below. In the meantime you can learn more about Appreciative Living here.

• What Is Appreciative Living?  to understand the overall philosophy.
• The Appreciative Mindset  to understand the core thinking orientation.
• The 4-Step Rapid Change Process  to learn the full transformation model for how to address the underlying causes driving the unwanted habit. (this page is coming soon!)