75 Bad Habits Examples and What to Replace Them With
Bad habits are behaviours repeated automatically in a stable context, cued by the situation rather than chosen, which is why deciding to stop rarely survives the situation. This list gives 75 examples grouped into seven areas: phone and attention, sleep and evenings, food and drink, money and spending, work and focus, body and health, and mind, mood and other people. Each one is paired with a replacement behaviour specific enough to record, because a competing response occupies the moment the habit would have filled (Azrin & Nunn, 1973). One widely repeated piece of advice does not hold up: in two diary studies published by Quinn, Pascoe, Wood and Neal in 2010, removing the trigger, known as stimulus control, worked on temptations but not on strong habits. The only strategy that helped against strong habits was vigilant monitoring, meaning watching for the slip and catching it, which is what a written record makes possible.
Every list of bad habits gives you the same thing: names. Scrolling, snoozing, snacking, overspending. Naming a habit has never changed one, because the naming is not the hard part. The hard part is that the situation which sets the habit off is still there tomorrow morning. So this list gives each habit a second column: the behaviour that occupies the same moment, in a form specific enough to tick.
What are some examples of bad habits?
The 75 below are grouped into seven areas: phone and attention, sleep and evenings, food and drink, money and spending, work and focus, body and health, and mind, mood and other people. They are ordinary rather than dramatic, because ordinary is what a habit is: a behaviour repeated so often in the same context that the context starts it for you. Each row names the habit and the replacement that fills the same slot in the day.
That definition does real work here. A bad decision is made once, with your attention on it. A bad habit runs while your attention is elsewhere. In two diary studies at Texas A&M University, Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn and Deborah Kashy found that when people were performing habitual behaviour, behaviour done almost daily in a stable context, their thoughts were typically about something unrelated to what they were doing. Nobody decides to check their phone at a red light. That is the point.
The 75 examples, with a replacement for each
Read the second column as the thing you do at the moment the habit would have started, not as a general improvement. A replacement that is vaguer than the habit it replaces will lose, every time, because the habit is specific and immediate and the replacement is not.
Phone and attention
The largest category, and the one where the cue is hardest to remove: the phone comes with you. Notice that most replacements below change where the object is, not how much you want it.
| # | The habit | The replacement you tick instead |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Checking your phone before getting out of bed | phone charges outside the bedroom overnight |
| 2 | Scrolling in bed at night | phone on the kitchen counter after 22:00 |
| 3 | Refreshing the same three apps in a loop | one scheduled check, 20 minutes, timer running |
| 4 | Doom scrolling the news | news read once a day in a browser, app deleted |
| 5 | Opening a short video app with no end point | one video chosen before the app opens |
| 6 | Phone on the table during meals | phone face down in another room while you eat |
| 7 | Taking your phone to the bathroom | phone stays outside the door |
| 8 | Answering notifications the second they arrive | notifications off, two batches a day |
| 9 | Reading work messages in bed | work apps signed out of the phone |
| 10 | Reaching for the phone at every queue and red light | ten slow breaths, nothing opened |
| 11 | Saving articles you never read | one saved article read before the next one is saved |
| 12 | Toggling do not disturb by hand, sometimes | a scheduled quiet window, same hours daily |
Sleep and evenings
Sleep habits look like willpower problems and are almost always scheduling problems. Each replacement here is a time or a place, which is why it can be ticked.
| # | The habit | The replacement you tick instead |
|---|---|---|
| 13 | Going to bed at a different time every night | same lights out time, seven days a week |
| 14 | Staying up late to reclaim time you did not get | 30 minutes of your own time taken before 21:00 |
| 15 | Hitting snooze four times | one alarm, placed across the room |
| 16 | Coffee after 16:00 | last coffee before 14:00 |
| 17 | Falling asleep with a screen playing | screen off before you lie down |
| 18 | Eating your largest meal at 22:00 | dinner finished three hours before bed |
| 19 | Working in bed | work stays at the desk or the kitchen table |
| 20 | Drinking to fall asleep | a glass of water and ten pages of a book |
| 21 | Weekend wake-up three hours later than weekdays | wake-up within an hour of the weekday time |
| 22 | Planning tomorrow at midnight | three tasks written before you leave the desk |
Food and drink
Food habits are cued by time, place and tiredness far more than by hunger. The replacements are portions, positions and a written list, not a diet.
| # | The habit | The replacement you tick instead |
|---|---|---|
| 23 | Skipping breakfast then overeating at noon | something with protein within an hour of waking |
| 24 | Eating standing at the counter | one meal a day sitting down, no screen |
| 25 | Snacking straight from the packet | a portion on a plate, packet back in the cupboard |
| 26 | Drinking most of your calories | water first, anything else second |
| 27 | Ordering delivery whenever you are tired | one frozen backup meal kept for tired days |
| 28 | Food shopping while hungry | a written list, shopped after eating |
| 29 | Finishing the plate long after you are full | fork down halfway, 60 seconds, then decide |
| 30 | Cooking nothing all week | one cooked meal, one named evening |
| 31 | Alcohol on weeknights by default | alcohol-free Monday to Thursday, counted not estimated |
| 32 | Vaping through the working day | each craving met with water and a two-minute walk |
| 33 | Only drinking water once you have a headache | a full glass before every meal |
Money and spending
Money habits are the easiest to deny and the easiest to verify, because the bank already logged them. Most replacements below are a date in the calendar.
| # | The habit | The replacement you tick instead |
|---|---|---|
| 34 | Buying from adverts inside apps | 48 hours between wanting it and buying it |
| 35 | Never looking at your balance | balance read once a week, same day |
| 36 | Paying for subscriptions you stopped using | one subscription reviewed each month |
| 37 | Shopping when bored or upset | the item goes on a list, not in the basket |
| 38 | Estimating your spending in your head | the actual number written down weekly |
| 39 | Saving whatever is left at month end | transfer on payday, automatic, first |
| 40 | Buy now pay later on small purchases | one card, on a balance you can see |
| 41 | Leaving cash idle for a year without deciding | one financial decision a quarter, in the calendar |
| 42 | Paying bills late by accident | direct debit set, one reminder day a month |
| 43 | Never reading the statement line by line | ten minutes on Sunday, one statement |
Work and focus
Work habits get labelled as productivity and they behave like every other habit: same room, same hour, same trigger. The replacements set a boundary rather than an intention.
| # | The habit | The replacement you tick instead |
|---|---|---|
| 44 | Email open in a tab all day | email closed, opened at two set times |
| 45 | Starting the day inside other people’s requests | first 45 minutes on your own task, nothing else open |
| 46 | Accepting every meeting invitation | one question asked: what decision needs me here |
| 47 | Working across four windows at once | one window, one task, until the timer ends |
| 48 | Working without a break until you crash | 50 minutes on, 10 minutes away from the screen |
| 49 | Leaving the hardest task until the evening | hardest task first, before the second coffee |
| 50 | Eating lunch at the desk | 20 minutes away from the desk, every working day |
| 51 | Keeping the task list in your head | three tasks written the evening before |
| 52 | Polishing a draft nobody has read | first version sent at 70 percent |
| 53 | Answering quick questions all afternoon | two blocks a day, questions batched into them |
| 54 | Reopening the laptop after dinner | laptop closed and put away at a set hour |
| 55 | Ending the week unsure what you did | five lines written on Friday: what moved |
Body and health
This group contains the nervous habits, and those are the ones with the oldest evidence behind the replacement approach. A competing response is a movement you can do instead, in the same second.
| # | The habit | The replacement you tick instead |
|---|---|---|
| 56 | Sitting four hours without standing | stand and walk two minutes every hour |
| 57 | Taking the lift for one floor | stairs under four floors, no exceptions |
| 58 | Only exercising when you feel like it | two fixed sessions a week, in the calendar |
| 59 | Skipping the warm-up | five minutes, before the first set |
| 60 | Biting your nails | hands into a competing movement the moment you notice |
| 61 | Picking at your skin | the same competing response, held for one minute |
| 62 | Clenching your jaw at the desk | one check at the top of each hour: jaw loose |
| 63 | Slouching into the laptop | screen at eye level, checked once each morning |
| 64 | Cancelling medical appointments | one booked appointment kept per quarter |
| 65 | Smoking | zero cigarettes, counted, each craving met with a two-minute action |
Mind, mood and other people
The habits nobody lists, because they leave no evidence. They are still cued behaviour, and they are still replaceable. The last one is the reason this article exists.
| # | The habit | The replacement you tick instead |
|---|---|---|
| 66 | Replaying an argument at 02:00 | written on paper, dealt with in daylight |
| 67 | Measuring your week against other people’s highlight reels | one account unfollowed each time you notice the feeling |
| 68 | Complaining with no request attached | one complaint turned into one ask |
| 69 | Interrupting people mid-sentence | wait for the full stop, every time you catch it |
| 70 | Only messaging people when you need something | one message a week with no ask in it |
| 71 | Cancelling plans the same day | one plan kept per week, whatever the mood |
| 72 | Apologising for taking up space | thank you, instead of sorry |
| 73 | Saying yes and resenting it afterwards | one honest no a week |
| 74 | Leaving the difficult conversation on the shelf | one postponed conversation started per month |
| 75 | Working on all of this privately | one person told what you are changing this week |
Why replace a bad habit instead of stopping it?
Because stopping leaves the cue with nothing to do, and the cue is the part that repeats. The idea has an unusually old and specific evidence base. In 1973, Nathan Azrin and Gregory Nunn published habit reversal in Behaviour Research and Therapy, a method for nervous habits and tics built on a competing response: a movement the person performs instead, physically incompatible with the habit, at the moment the urge appears. It is the ancestor of the habit reversal training still used for nail biting, hair pulling and tics today, and it is the reason rows 60 and 61 in this list describe a movement rather than a resolution.
A replacement that is vaguer than the habit it replaces will lose, every time.
Does removing the trigger actually work?
For strong habits, the research says it does not, which contradicts the most common advice on this topic. Search for how to break a bad habit and you will be told to change your cue: take your break somewhere other than the cafeteria, move the biscuit tin, avoid the situation. That strategy has a name in the literature, stimulus control, and it has been tested directly against real habits. Our guide to how to break bad habits goes through the alternatives the evidence actually supports, including why the wording of a replacement plan changes whether it works.
Jeffrey Quinn, Anthony Pascoe, Wendy Wood and David Neal ran two episode-sampling diary studies, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2010, asking people what they actually did when they tried to control an unwanted habit. Stimulus control worked, but on temptations rather than habits. Against strong habits, the authors report that no strategy was useful except one: vigilant monitoring, described in the paper as thinking “don’t do it” and watching carefully for slipups. A follow-up experiment found that monitoring does not weaken the habit memory itself. It raises the inhibitory control that catches the response before it runs.
So the honest version of the replacement advice is two-handed. The competing response gives the moment something to do, which is the Azrin and Nunn contribution. Noticing the moment at all is the part Quinn and colleagues found to be doing the work. A written record is how noticing stops depending on mood, and a meta-analysis of 138 studies by Benjamin Harkin and colleagues at the University of Sheffield, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2016, found that prompting people to monitor their progress had a reliable effect on goal attainment, and that the effect was larger when progress was physically recorded and larger again when it was made public.
How do you track a habit you are trying to quit?
You tick the day you did not do it, which turns an absence into something with evidence. A habit you are building leaves a trace: the run happened, the pages were read. A habit you are quitting leaves nothing, so there is no natural record and no way to tell a good week from a bad one three weeks later. Recording the clean day fixes that, and it doubles as the vigilant monitoring the 2010 research points to.
Two rules make it survivable. Track the replacement alongside the abstinence, so the entry says what you did and not only what you avoided. And measure it as a percentage of days rather than as a streak, because a streak counter resets a month of real progress to zero over one bad Tuesday, which is the exact moment most people quit. We wrote about that failure mode separately in streaks versus consistency. If you want the positive half of this list, the trackable habits worth adding, that is in 150 habit tracker ideas.
Where StellarHabit fits
StellarHabit is our habit tracker, and it is built around the two findings above rather than around a streak counter. You log the replacement behaviour daily, the app scores you as a consistency percentage so one missed day is one missed day, and your habits are visible to a small group of people you choose. That last part is the deliberate one: the Harkin meta-analysis found monitoring worked better when progress was recorded, and better still when it was public.
It is worth being clear about what it does not do. It will not remove your cues for you, it has no financial penalty, and it is a poor fit if you want to track alone and tell nobody. Row 75 of the list above is the habit we think matters most, and it is also the one we have an obvious interest in you agreeing with, so treat it accordingly. If you are looking for a person rather than an app, we wrote a guide on finding an accountability partner that does not require signing up for anything.
Frequently asked questions
What are the most common bad habits?
The ones that show up in every area of daily life rather than the dramatic ones: checking your phone before getting out of bed, hitting snooze repeatedly, eating standing at the counter, snacking straight from the packet, keeping email open in a tab all day, sitting for hours without standing, biting your nails, scrolling in bed, buying from adverts inside apps, and replaying an argument at two in the morning. What they share is not severity. It is that each one is triggered by a situation you meet every day, so the behaviour starts before you have decided anything.
What counts as a bad habit rather than a bad decision?
Automaticity. A bad habit is a behaviour you repeat in a stable context, started by the situation rather than chosen in the moment, and which works against a goal you actually hold. A bad decision is made once, with your attention on it. The distinction is measurable: in diary studies by Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn and Deborah Kashy at Texas A&M University, published in 2002, people performing habitual behaviour were typically thinking about something unrelated to what they were doing, because the action did not need conscious guidance.
Is it better to replace a bad habit or just stop it?
Replace it. Stopping leaves the cue with nothing to do, and the cue is the part that repeats tomorrow. The approach has an old evidence base: habit reversal, published by Nathan Azrin and Gregory Nunn in Behaviour Research and Therapy in 1973, is built on a competing response, a movement performed instead of the habit at the moment the urge appears, physically incompatible with it. That is why the replacements in this list are specific actions tied to a moment rather than resolutions to do better.
Does avoiding the trigger work for breaking bad habits?
Less well than almost every article on the subject suggests. Removing or changing the cue is called stimulus control, and it was tested against real habits in two episode-sampling diary studies by Jeffrey Quinn, Anthony Pascoe, Wendy Wood and David Neal, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2010. Stimulus control was effective at inhibiting responses to temptations, but the authors report that no strategy was useful against strong habits except vigilant monitoring, described as thinking do not do it and watching carefully for slipups. A follow-up experiment indicated that monitoring works by heightening inhibitory control rather than by weakening the habit itself.
How long does it take to break a bad habit?
There is no established number, and anyone quoting 21 days is repeating a misreading. The often cited research on this topic, by Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London in 2010, measured how long a new behaviour took to become automatic, with a median of 66 days and an individual range of 18 to 254 days. It did not measure how long an existing habit takes to fade. Treat any specific figure for breaking a habit as unsourced until you see the study behind it.
How do you track a habit you are trying to quit?
Record the clean day. A habit you are building leaves evidence, while a habit you are quitting leaves nothing, so without a record there is no way to tell a good week from a bad one later. Ticking the day you did not do it creates that evidence and doubles as the vigilant monitoring the 2010 research points to. Two rules make it last: log the replacement behaviour alongside the abstinence so the entry says what you did rather than only what you avoided, and score it as a percentage of days rather than as a streak, because a streak resets weeks of real progress to zero after one bad day.
Sources
- Azrin, N. H., & Nunn, R. G. (1973). Habit-reversal: A method of eliminating nervous habits and tics. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 11(4), 619-628.
- Quinn, J. M., Pascoe, A., Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2010). Can't control yourself? Monitor those bad habits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(4), 499-511.
- Wood, W., Quinn, J. M., & Kashy, D. A. (2002). Habits in everyday life: Thought, emotion, and action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1281-1297.
- Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198-229.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.