Coaching practices for Reduce Friction Bad Habits

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Reduce Friction Bad Habits, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• The thing I’m trying to cut is just too easy
• I know exactly what I should do, but every time there’s some little hassle in the way
• I genuinely want to do the thing
• There’s this exact little build-up right before I do it
• It’s not that I don’t want to do the thing

Practices that may help

1. Add friction to unwanted behaviors
   Inserting even a small obstacle between you and an unwanted behavior meaningfully reduces how often it happens.
   Environment Design for Behavior Change
2. Remove one small obstacle at a time
   Eliminate tiny points of friction so the good behavior becomes the path of least resistance.
   Kaizen: Change by Tiny Steps
3. Reduce friction for good behaviors to near zero
   Make the healthy behavior the path of least resistance by removing every avoidable obstacle between you and starting.
   Environment Design for Behavior Change
4. Recognize the premonitory urge — the signal before the signal
   Most repetitive habits are preceded by a distinct physical sensation; learning to feel it gives you the earliest possible intervention point.
   Habit Reversal Training, Made Practical
5. Reduce friction on desired behaviors
   Make the healthy choice two fewer steps than the unhealthy one.
   Nudge Theory, Made Practical
6. Use effort pacts
   Add friction that makes distraction harder to slip into without thinking.
   Indistractable, Made Practical
7. Clarify the personal costs of the habit to sustain motivation
   HRT requires consistent effort — mapping specific ways the habit costs you makes that effort worth maintaining.
   Habit Reversal Training, Made Practical
8. Reduce the whole habit to one rule: don’t break the chain
   Replace a tangle of goals with a single instruction your brain can’t negotiate with.
   Don't Break the Chain: The Streak Method
9. Keep the cue and reward, swap the routine
   Duhigg’s “golden rule”: change a habit by inserting a new routine between the same cue and reward.
   The Power of Habit, Made Practical
10. Add friction to attention-capture apps
    Increase the effort required to open distracting apps so the default path is not the lowest-resistance one.
    The Attention Economy: Reclaiming Your Focus from Systems Designed to Capture It

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