When you identify an unwanted behavior that you want to change, do you want to find a way to do this immediately, and tend to criticize yourself when you fail and give in?

If you answered YES, this is for you.

I recognized self-criticism as a limiting factor in my own growth, and, through trial and error, I’ve found ways to overcome that tendency. As a coach, I’ve seen the same tendency in my clients, and I find that the same techniques work for them. Instead of simply trying to stop unwanted behavior, we work on creating a new habit of loving-kindness, which both acts as a replacement habit and supports us in our growth.

In order for you to properly change a behavior, you need to accept that there is no short term fix and that a change in deeply ingrained unhelpful behaviors happens over the long term.

Sometimes, even after years of “breaking a bad habit,” the neural pathways of the old habit are still there — so there is no such thing as “breaking” an unhelpful habit. It’s helpful to create new alternative pathways via new habits.

Creating new habits is easier than quitting old ones.

Creating an overriding good habit, then, is the way of least resistance. The key is to make sure that your new behaviors have the same triggers and rewards as the old behavior.

The first step to actual change is to start by being more compassionate towards ourselves, to slow down, and to be more observant. The goal is to be observant without judging, be curious about why you do what you do, to try to understand yourself, and to not beat yourself up.

When you beat yourself up, it can act as a reward for your brain because the brain prefers pain rather than being in a state of tension. So you need to avoid this, as it can act as an immediate gratification and undermine your efforts.

Now that you have a bit of a background about the do’s and don’ts of changing a behavior, how should you start?

I start with clients by replacing the bad habit of beating themselves up with a new habit of loving-kindness meditation. Once this habit is established, it becomes a wonderful foundation for breaking other bad habits.

Loving-Kindness Meditation

After constant research and experimentation on myself and clients, I came up with a system to address those hard-to-crack cases like me and a few of my clients who seemed to be unable to sustainably do the behaviors they wanted—and to avoid the ones they don’t want.

One component that consistently showed up in all of us? Self-criticism.

What follows is the solution that I found through a process of iterating over different techniques. It specifically addresses this tendency towards self-criticism.

We start in the first month by doing daily loving-kindness meditation practice. We do this because research has shown that this form of meditation strengthens the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve among many other functions is also responsible for our empathy and compassion towards others and towards ourselves.

Sometimes my clients, especially those unfamiliar with meditation, find loving-kindness meditation a bit weird. They usually ask me, “How does imagining myself and wishing myself well — then wishing our most beloved ones and consecutively going to less familiar people saying positive wishes to them — help with making me more compassionate? I am not doing anything in action, I am just imagining stuff.”

What happens in loving-kindness meditation is that it acts as a simulation environment for your brain. There is a very thin line in our subconscious between imagination and actual events, so the vagus nerve still activates. The same effect with our imagination has also been observed in the laboratory, where athletes were asked to imagine that they were exercising and scientists saw that both the motor cortex of the brain and the muscles themselves activated almost as if they were actually training. This is what happens with loving-kindness meditation, too. After all, compassionate thoughts are compassionate thoughts whether they are accompanied by an action or not. Your “compassion muscle” gets a workout.

When I first started out practicing loving-kindness meditation, I struggled with consistently making it part of my routine. In 2017, I discovered BJ Fogg’s work, and ever since, I’ve been trying to filter any behavior that I implement through his behavioral design principles—and it worked pretty damn well I can say.

To make loving-kindness meditation a habit, we use BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits methodology for creating long term automatic habits, which minimizes the need for motivation in the behavioral equation.

Back when I found BJ Fogg’s work, I had to scramble through various posts on Twitter, YouTube videos, and his websites, but you’re lucky because you can go directly to his great book Tiny Habits, which was released in early 2020, to get all of the details on the methodology.

Step 1: Identify the tiny version of the desired behavior

In brief, a good mini-behavior to try has three components:

1. It doesn’t require any real effort.

2. Ideally, it takes 30 seconds approximately or less.

3. It doesn’t create any negative feelings.

In this case, the desired behavior is doing loving-kindness meditation. First, let’s break down loving-kindness meditation to its components. This type of meditation is made up of six parts (details on these parts can be found here).

• Good wishes to yourself.

• Good wishes to loved ones.

• Good wishes to acquaintances which we have positive feelings towards but are not fully familiar with.

• Good wishes to people towards whom we have neutral feelings.

• Good wishes to someone towards whom we have negative feelings.

• Good wishes to everyone and everything in this world.

The whole meditation takes around 15 minutes and it’s broken down to three rounds of 3–5 wishes for each of the six parts. The most common phrases used in loving-kindness meditation can be seen in the image below.

(Poe, 2020)

Of course, with each individual, there can be some adjustment to how the loving-kindness meditation is conducted. For example, a person who finds it difficult to empathize with strangers can say “just like me, this person wishes to live a good life, just like I wish for myself, may you be happy, may you be healthy”, etc.

OK, let’s start creating our meditation habit.

Start by writing 3–5 good wishes that you want for yourself — the very basic and main things that you want no matter what. The ones that you resonate with. Write them and repeat them in your mind. Now you’ll use these to create a tiny behavior out of them.

There are two options I’ve found working the best, either just saying the 3 to 5 wishes to yourself for one round as your scaled-down version of the meditation, or saying just one wish for each of the six parts.

Personally, the second version has worked better for me, but I have found many of my clients prefer the first version just for the extra boost in self-compassion. (If you find that you struggle with consistently doing even this scaled-down version every day, you may want to consider experimenting with an even smaller starter step instead. A great starter step would be putting your hand on your heart or simply closing your eyes.)

Choose what works best for you. You can revise it again and again until you find what works best for you.

Step 2: Find a good anchor

An anchor is a time and situation to root the new behavior within. A good anchor matches the behavior in these ways:

• Location.

• Frequency.

• Theme.

A meditation anchor I’ve found to work well for many people—including myself—is after I eat dinner.

Photo by Pablo Merchán Montes on Unsplash

This is because dinner has the right frequency (once a day), the right location physically because you can do the meditation as you are sitting in your chair, and the right location mentally because usually after eating you are relaxed, as your parasympathetic nervous system activates for the digestive process. Most people eat their dinner after work, and it’s a transition time, so they can spare an extra 15 minutes after eating. When the time comes, there will be room for the meditation habit to grow to the number of minutes we want.

Dinner has the right theme because eating is a self-sustenance and nurturing behavior for most people.

Eating dinner for many people is a “super anchor”—meaning that it is something you do, no matter how much your context changes. Whether you are in California or Bali, in your house or outside, happy or stressed, you eat dinner.

But remember an important part of the Tiny Habits method is to find what works best for you—so if this anchor is not right for you, change it. For example, some of my clients tried dinner as the anchor but it didn’t work—there wasn’t room in that part of the day for the habit to grow to its full extent of 15 minutes. The key is to find an anchor that works for you—one that doesn’t require you to use willpower to do the behavior.

We aim to create a Tiny Habit that we consistently and automatically do as part of our routine, and that allows for space for the full version of the behavior we want to grow. In this case, we want to work up to about 15 minutes of loving-kindness meditation daily.

Step 3: Find an immediate celebration

The third step is that you need to find an immediate celebration. This celebration has to either happen while you do the behavior or immediately after you do it.

Celebrations are not incentives. A celebration helps wire in behavior, while an incentive can help boost your motivation to keep doing it.

Incentives don’t usually work for habit change. They typically are received further out after the behavior. The brain is engaged with a desire for the incentive. (This is why treats for sticking to a diet program often backfire.) Instead, you want to reinforce the good behavior with a celebration for a job well-done instead.

What I do as a celebration in the case of loving-kindness meditation is to smile with my eyes and stay for a bit longer with the nice and warm feeling that the meditation leaves me with. I smile even while doing the meditation, most of the time. No better way to wire it than that!

The celebration is a huge component in the wiring in and solidifying behaviors, and you’ll find more about it in Fogg’s work.

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash

A Tiny Habit Recipe for Six Weeks of Loving-Kindness Meditation

Here’s a six-week recipe I like to use to build this habit.

• Week 1: Every day after I eat dinner, I close my eyes and repeat three wishes towards myself. I like to use, “May I be healthy, may I have the ability to experience whatever I want, may I be happy.”

• Week 2: I add the well-wishing towards very loved ones, close friends, my partner, etc. After I eat dinner, I repeat three wishes for myself; to wire the habit in, I smile after I repeat the three wishes towards myself. I visualize a loved one and repeat the same three wishes directed towards them; to wire it in, I smile.

• Week 3: I do the same as week 2, but now add my friends and acquaintances.

• Week 4: Continuing to build up from week 3, I add people towards whom I am neutral.

• Week 5: I add people I feel negative towards.

• Week 6: I add a final round for the whole world.

Again, it’s very important to celebrate every time you do a Tiny Habit because it wires the habit into your brain. I do this by smiling as I do it. Emotions create habits.

If you find that wishing yourself well is difficult, you can start week one with wishing the people you love well. Then in week two, add yourself, and continue the process from there.

As I said, an important component of this method for habit building is NOT to feel any negative emotions while doing it, so skipping a week’s wishes and getting back to them at a later time is okay too. And remember, consider it to be a recipe that you can play around with it, and adjust as you find what works for you. You may find for example, that the anchor of sitting at the chair after dinner is not a good anchor for you, or that at week two, you haven’t yet made the week one meditation automatic and you need more time to build it. These are all flexible based on your needs, so change them.

As time passes, by practicing loving-kindness meditation, you will start to notice that you allow yourself to be more observant and don’t beat yourself up. It is, in fact, becoming a replacement habit for the former bad habit of being overly self-critical.

When that begins to happen, I start introducing more mindfulness meditation and mindfulness practices in the daily routine. That takes some motivation to do, so make sure to use the momentum you have, and be sure that the behavior you are trying to change is something that you really want to change in your life. When you find yourself a bit unmotivated about doing this process, remind yourself what is the long term vision here.

Here is a related Tiny Habit I have found helpful for myself and my clients: After I feel like giving up, I will say to myself: “Remember why you are doing this,” and smile immediately after.

Having an accountability partner or doing this process in companion to other people who have the same aspiration can also help (but only if they help you feel successful).

Building the Mindfulness Meditation Habit

Now that you have ingrained the loving-kindness meditation behavior, it is a good time to start working more on your mindfulness. Why? Because imagine working on increasing the awareness of the thoughts and feelings you have while being in a state of high self-criticism — like it’s not enough already that you are self-critical, let’s now look at more of all the other craziness that goes inside us and self criticize how we think, as well! It can become a self-defeating perpetual circle. It sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me. But by first working on behaviors like loving-kindness meditation that fundamentally change the physiology responsible for our empathy, you set yourself up for success.

In the second month, I start introducing mindfulness principles and techniques with my clients.

Mindfulness meditation increases your awareness: your body awareness, your emotional awareness, and the awareness of your thoughts. Much like the loving-kindness meditation for the vagus nerve, the mindfulness meditation acts like a workout for your attention muscles. Of course, both mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation have many more benefits too, but I won’t focus on those here.

Being more mindful of when your urge to do your unhelpful behavior comes up.

What follows is a list of points to be mindful of, for any bad habit that you’d like to quit. Notice when you feel the urge to do it, and for 15 days, write down:

• What time was it?

• How was I feeling before I got the urge?

• What was I thinking before I got the urge?

• What was I doing before I got the urge?

• What other people around me were doing before I felt the urge?

• Where was I when the urge occurred?

This way you can identify the emotion and the sensations that arise so we can nail down the reward and the potential substituting behaviors more easily. To that end, also note how you feel after you have done the behavior you are trying to quit:

• How do you feel afterward? (Specifically, how you feel because of the behavior, not the guilt. Your loving-kindness meditation will help here.)

• What are the sensations in your body? (Right after the behavior—observe these so we can find the reward.)

• What are the potential rewards? (Brainstorm on all the potential rewards that you are getting from this behavior and test each one by doing something else that gives you the same reward.)

For example, if your unhelpful behavior is smoking, then maybe your reward is socializing. Try to go out and talk to people without smoking. Wait for 10–15 minutes—do you still desire to do the negative behavior? If yes, go on to the next potential reward.

Eventually, you will identify the right behavior substitutes by this process and using what you learn to successfully override the unwanted behavior. You can apply what you learned with the Tiny Habit of Loving-Kindness meditation to replace your self-criticism, and design a new habit strategy to replace any bad habit you wish to stop.

Going Forward

Congratulate yourself! You have taken the time and put in the effort to go through all the steps needed to make loving-kindness meditation a habit, and have identified the new positive substitute behaviors—you are ready to go.

For the purpose of this article, I divided the process into weeks and months. Of course, it’s totally okay if you need five months to do this process—or if you are able to make this a habit within just six weeks. The specific time frame depends on your situation and the habit you are trying to break.

If you want more individualized support or have any questions, book your 15 minute consultation call by clicking here