Yeah, the great thing about hunger is that like any nerve stimulus, it goes away after about 20 minutes if you ignore it. Your brain is designed to ramp down any specific neural input after a certain amount of time, otherwise it would never be able to prioritize sensory stimulus.

great post! The 20 sec rule is particularly interesting, this is similar to many barriers of good/bad habits - I find for example that if all my gym gear is ready and laid out, I can guarantee I'll work out the following morning as there's no barrier!

I try to remind myself that what I'm eating is not the last of its kind in earth. There will be other sandwiches, so it's okay if I don't eat the whole thing and wind up throwing it out.

I quit smoking 2 years ago. My health insurance has a quitting smoking program, with counselor and all. At least with smoking, the plan that was most successful with her patients was the slow break of the habit. Effectively, a month before the quit smoking date, change everything up.

If your bad habit is overeating, I've gotten great results by reminding myself that hunger isn't an emergency. It takes that panicky edge off of the hunger, and allows me to go back to whatever I was doing before.

When I quit smoking, I carried a pack of cigarettes with me in my purse like I normally always did, just in case the cravings became too much. I never smoked one of my "emergency cigarettes", didn't have to. Just knowing that I had them and having forgived myself in advance if I smoked one lessened the cravings. When…

I used that book to quit smoking in 1997, I cannot recommend it strongly enough. I planned to quit for a full 6 months before actually doing it. 18 years and counting <knock on wood>.

Alan Carr's book on writing smoking basically teaches the same. It really helps rewire your thoughts about smoking and take every last argument for it away. The mental battle seems to be the hardest. Kudos on quitting.

I think this falls under #1 but when I finally quit smoking about 2 months ago, every time I would get a bad craving and think about how much I wanted one, I reminded myself that it was just my mind playing tricks on me. This somewhat helped me to grasp that it wasn't the end of the world if I didn't have one and…