Breaking or forming a habit is no easy task. Often you need to develop a habit in order to break one. Habits are elusive, they say it takes 21 days to form a habit but this is misleading, it really depends on the habit you’re trying to build and what is motivating that habit in the first place.
“On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact. And how long it takes a new habit to form can vary widely depending on the behavior, the person, and the circumstances. In Lally’s study, it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days for people to form a new habit.” – James Clear
I think it stands to reason then; if forming a new habit can take 18 to 254 days, breaking a habit probably takes the same amount of time. It’s not about willpower or discipline. It’s about understanding your motivation and observing your emotions. Have you asked yourself what motivates you to spend money on the things you currently spend money on? Is it an emotion like anxiety or sadness or is it a need like hunger and thirst? Once you know your motivation then it’s about finding ways to get yourself to stay consistent when forming or breaking new habits.
Is Spending a Habit?
Spending itself can certainly be a habit but if you identify with having a habit of spending, specifically overspending, I challenge you to dig deeper. We should start with the premise that money is not emotionally tethered to anything. Our emotions are tethered to other things like desire, responsibility, and feelings of excitement or inadequacy and they affect our behavior, mood, perspective, etc. It just so happens that money is the medium that gets us those things. If we lived in a different social economic system, money probably wouldn’t seemingly have as much control over us.
Questions you should ask yourself: Is spending my habit? Or is getting coffee the habit I am spending money on? Is spending my habit, or is browsing online the habit tempting me to buy retail items? Is spending the habit, or am I not planning my day to go to the grocery store and cook, instead of always ordering online? Is spending my habit, or am I trying to compensate for anxiety, lack of self-esteem, or some other sense of inadequacy?
How Do I Break a Spending Habit?
It’s important to ask yourself these deeper questions of what habit you’re really trying to tackle. I’ll argue that spending money isn’t the habit you’re challenged by, it’s rooted somewhere else. Once you’ve taken time to ask yourself these deeper questions, then work towards a plan to address those habits by tackling the answer to those deeper questions. How can you whittle those “negative” habits down? Do you take time to identify whether they make you feel good or bad? What habits can you replace them with that offer positive incentives?
Take time to reflect on how much money you spend on the habit you’re trying to break. Break it down into different versions of itself. For example, if you spend $150 a month on Starbucks, how much is that per year, per week, per day? What could you do with that same amount of money? For example:
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$1,800 per year could be a round-trip ticket, hotel, and car rental to the Caribbean
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$150 per month could be money invested on a regular basis for a larger goal
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$34.62 per week could be a couple of books to read, museums to visit, a yoga/fitness class
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$4.93 per day could be your mass transit cost
The point of this exercise is to see how else you could use your money and find something that resonates with your desires and values in a positive way. It also breaks down the “habit of spending” from what you spend your money on now, to what you could spend your money on in the future. There are different strategies to form and/or break new habits but it starts with finding your internal motivation on both sides of the equation and being observant of your current behaviors.
