From Struggle to Success - Goals and strategies to beat addictions
Photo by Carolina Nichitin on Unsplash
The Setup and goal
As promised, we are going to do a second practical session with goal setting, making a process/lifestyle approach. We will be using aspects of the exercises from the two newsletters:
“Unlock your potential: 🎖️ The secrets to effective goal setting life habits”
“Enjoying the journey 🧗 – Mastering complementary strategies to achieve your goals”
(To know more, you can find them by clicking here.)
The goal: “Sarah wants to quit smoking by the end of 2024, and not ever return to it.”
• Is it S.M.A.R.T.?
Specific: Yes – we know the outcome we want
Measurable: Yes – There are no cigarettes being used
Achievable: Yes – with the right plan, and internal motivation
Realistic: Yes – Beating smoking can be done
Time-based: Yes – we have an end date
• Does it have a 🎓 Mastery approach? – Yes, we need to learn new skills, processes, and strategies to conquer smoking.
Recall that the Mastery Approach can be defined as: The personal drive (motivation and self-belief) to learn and achieve a goal by learning, developing competence, and mastering new skills (Epton et al. (2017), and Bardach et al. (2020). To achieve the goal, as Swann et al. (2023) writes, we must have this internal motivation to help us achieve our goals. The Mastery Approach has two parts to it: The Outcome, and the Behaviour:
• Do we have an Outcome and Behavioural Aspect?
-) Outcome: Yes, we know what the final result is.
-) Behavioural: No, we need to design a sustainable process to get us there
• Do we have a lifestyle approach?
Yes, we know that once we have beaten smoking, we never want to go back to it. Therefore, we need a sustainable way to make sure we don’t go back to it, or even feel a desire for it. It promotes the idea of continuing to use the skill/process, especially if we LIKE and ENJOY it.
Recall that a Lifestyle approach can be defined as: Learning and using a skill/process that can be sustained/grown as a regular life habit to reach milestones and accomplish a final goal that can also be used after the goal’s completion (bonus points if it’s enjoyable!)
So, the good news is: most of the goal is sorted, now, we need to design the process to get us out of the smoking habit. This requires us looking at Complementary Strategies, and making milestones to help. Let’s start with what some supporting strategies are, and then we can design the process:
Complementary Strategies
As we discussed in, “Enjoying the journey 🧗 – Mastering complementary strategies to achieve your goals” (here), a Complementary strategy is defined as: A method designed to support, reinforce, and sustain a behaviour to improve the likelihood of achieving a goal.
To quickly summarise the complementary strategies, we have:
• Visualization:
Picture your first milestone and remember why it’s important to you, motivating you to work towards it step by step.
• Positive Reinforcement:
Reward yourself for reaching milestones to boost motivation and make the habit sustainable.
• Mindfulness/Self-Monitoring:
Track progress through journals or apps and practice stress-relief techniques like meditation.
• Environment:
Create a dedicated space for your goal to get into the right mindset.
• Social Support:
Seek accountability partners or join groups to share progress and stay motivated, but be cautious about sharing goals too early.
The Process
We need a place to start, so for Sarah:
Week 1: Normal week, except now she is keeping a journal and counts how many cigarettes she has in a week, and keeps note if she has any ‘extras’ than normal due to stress, or other outside factors. She needs a number to work from (Complementary strategy: Self-monitoring).
To keep things simple, let’s say Sarah had 3 particularly stressful events this week and a cigarette helped relieve her. But outside of that, she had two each day, all seven days of the week.
Total of habitual cigarettes used: 14
Total of stress cigarettes taken: 3
Total no. of cigarettes: 17
• Now that we have numbers, Sarah can make a milestone. Each milestone needs to also follow a SMART method. In this instance, Sarah decides that milestone 1 is by going down to 12 habitual cigarettes per week, and doesn’t (yet) account for ‘stress cigarettes’.
Two weeks pass, Sarah was successful and she had only 12 habitual cigarettes, but in the first week, she had two stressful events, and in the second, she had four.
Week 1: 12 habit cigarettes, but 2 stress cigarettes, therefore total is 14
Week 2: 12 habit cigarettes, but 4 stressful events, therefore, total is 16
Sarah notes that overall, her total cigarette number has gone down, but she is struggling with, ‘stress cigarettes’ at the moment.
After reviewing her process (self-monitoring strategy), for the next 2 weeks, Sarah goes down to 11 habit cigarettes. She decided to keep more notes in a journal, not just about the number of cigarettes, but also why she is smoking the extra cigarette each time she has a, ‘stress event’. She finds it helps, and that now, it is not as interesting to her to smoke as a result of stress.
Week 3: 11 habit cigarettes, 3 stress events, total is 14
Week 4: 11 habit cigarettes, 2 stress events, total is 13
With this win, and seeing the overall number go down, Sarah goes down to 10 cigarettes, and is getting better at stress management. For her, she finds that going down by one cigarette instead of 2 each week was much more sustainable. So, she reviews her process and makes a plan for the next two weeks:
Week 5: 10 habit cigarettes, 2 stress events, Total is 12
Week 6: 10 habit cigarettes, 2 stress events, Total is 12
Sarah notices that her overall stress cigarette numbers are going down, but she decides to try and find other coping mechanisms. I.e. something to replace her ‘stress cigarettes.’ She goes with having a hot chocolate instead. She also noticed that she always had one stress cigarette during the week, and one in the weekend, so she decides to eliminate the weekend one and replace it by going out to a café she likes and getting a, “good hot chocolate”.
From here, this cycle repeats for Sarah, smoking fewer cigarettes each fortnight. When she reaches less than 10 total cigarettes, she celebrates with a close friend (positive reinforcement strategy). She does something else special when having less than 5 cigarettes each week. When she has kicked this habit once and for all, and found something to replace it as a positive, sustainable lifestyle habit, and something she enjoys and looks forward to, e.g. painting, she celebrates with her friends.
As you can see, she went one small step at a time. She made a process, went through time and experimentation by reviewing it in the early stages, and found a way to get rid of her habit once and for all.
Sarah also used the following strategies:
• Self-monitoring by journaling
• Positive reinforcement by celebrating with friends (this could have included accountability, if she had decided on this)
• Replacing* the two forms of her bad habit, i.e. habitual smoking replaced with art, and stress smoking with a hot chocolate.
Photo by Vladimir Kramer on Unsplash
*Voids and Replacing Bad Habits
There's one crucial aspect we need to address: Voids. A void occurs when a habit isn't replaced with something else. This is something I’ve only read and herd about through anecdotes, and seems to hold true. From what I can tell, people need an alternative activity to avoid reverting to the old habit. For example, Sarah replaced smoking with hot chocolate and painting. If she smoked, she couldn't paint, and vice versa. This strategy combines the desire to beat the bad habit with a positive, enjoyable replacement activity.
Replacing habits is tricky and depends on the individual, which is why complementary strategies and new lifestyles are necessary. It's best to replace a bad habit with something enjoyable, like going to the gym, taking a fitness class, walking with friends, or picking up a new hobby. The new habit must be more enjoyable than the bad one to ensure you're motivated to stick with it.
That’s it for the blog for this edition, and I hope it helps! Leave any thoughts or comments below!
Cheers!
Norskiwi
