What are some examples of bad habits?

Common ones include scrolling your phone in bed, hitting snooze, coffee late in the day, a bought coffee every workday, sugary drinks, smoking, drinking every evening by default, sitting for hours, checking messages constantly, and running late. Most cost sleep, money, health or attention.

What is the most common bad habit?

There is no single agreed answer, and rankings online are mostly opinion. Phone use is a strong candidate because it is the cue for so many others: scrolling in bed, checking messages at work, and being on a screen during meals and conversations.

How do you break a bad habit?

Pick one habit, write it as a rule you can answer yes or no each night, and find its trigger. Change your surroundings so the habit is harder to start, fill the gap with something else, tick off each day you held, and after a slip, get back on the next day.

How long does it take to break a bad habit?

It varies a lot from person to person, and the popular 21-day figure does not come from habit research. Plan on a couple of months before judging whether a change has stuck, and expect the first weeks to take the most effort.

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What are some bad habits? 24 common ones, and how to break the one that matters

What are some bad habits? 24 common ones, sorted by what they cost you, and a plain way to pick one and break it without trying to fix everything.

Nabeel Mustafa7 November 20267 min read

A young woman lying on her bed at night, lit by her phone screen, one of the most common bad habits

What are some bad habits? The common ones are small and daily: scrolling in bed, hitting snooze, a sugary drink every afternoon, a coffee too late in the day, skipping breakfast and then raiding the snack drawer at four. None of them looks like much on its own. A bad habit is any repeated behaviour that costs you more than it gives back, and the cost is in the repetition, not the single act.

Below are 24 of them, grouped by what they cost: sleep, money, health, time and attention, and the people around you. You will recognise a few. Then there is a short method for picking one and breaking it, because a list of everything wrong with you is not a plan.

Bad habits that cost you sleep

Scrolling your phone in bed. Five minutes becomes forty, and the lights go off late.
Hitting snooze. You trade a solid last stretch of sleep for broken ten-minute pieces.
Coffee after lunch. Caffeine lingers for hours, so a 4pm cup is still partly in you at bedtime.
A different bedtime every night, and a much later one at the weekend.
Dozing on the sofa in the evening, then lying awake at midnight.

Sleep habits are a good place to start because the cost is easy to measure. The CDC puts adults at seven or more hours a night. If you wake at 6:30, that means being asleep by 11:30, and the bedtime calculator does the sum for any age. The caffeine half-life calculator shows how much of that afternoon coffee is still around at 11pm, and the sleep debt calculator adds up what short nights have cost you this week.

Bad habits that cost you money

A bought coffee every workday.
Delivery food because cooking was not planned.
Subscriptions you forgot you pay for.
Impulse buys from a late-night scroll.
Buying lunch out by default, not by choice.

Money habits hide because each payment is small. Multiply instead of judging: a $5 coffee on 230 workdays is $1,150 a year. The habit cost calculator does this for any habit, and the latte factor calculator shows what the same money would grow to if you kept it. Neither tells you to stop. Plenty of people decide the coffee is worth $1,150 to them, and that is a fine decision once it is a decision.

A hand holding an orange takeaway coffee cup on a city street — Small daily payments are the easiest habits to miss.

Bad habits that cost your health

Smoking or vaping.
Drinking more than you mean to, or drinking every evening by default.
Sugary drinks through the day.
Sitting for hours without getting up.
Skipping meals, then overeating later.
Not drinking much water.

Two of these are in a different league. The CDC calls cigarette smoking the leading preventable cause of disease, death and disability in the United States, and says quitting brings health benefits at any age, no matter how long or how much you have smoked. The quit smoking calculator shows the time and money back since your last cigarette, and is a useful thing to look at on a hard day.

For alcohol, the CDC defines moderate drinking as two drinks or less in a day for men and one or less for women, and says drinking less is better for health than drinking more. If you are not sure how much you drink, the alcohol units calculator turns real glass sizes into a number, and the sobriety calculator counts the days once you stop.

Bad habits that cost time and attention

Checking your phone the moment you wake up.
Opening email or messages every few minutes while you work.
Leaving the hard task until the end of the day.
Saying yes to things before checking your calendar.

These rarely feel like habits because they do not involve a substance or a purchase. They are. A habit is the same action after the same cue, and the phone is the cue for most of them. The screen time calculator turns a daily average into days per year, which is usually enough to get someone's attention.

Bad habits that cost the people around you

Being on your phone during meals or conversations.
Running late as a pattern, not a one-off.
Interrupting.
Venting the same complaint every day without doing anything about it.

These are the hardest to see in yourself. Ask one person you trust which one of these they would remove if they could. Then believe the answer.

A woman sitting up in bed reading a book, with a bedside lamp on — A book on the pillow fills the slot the phone used to.

How to break a bad habit: one at a time

Pick one. Not the worst-sounding one, the one with the clearest cost that you would be glad to be rid of a month from now. Trying to drop five at once spreads attention thin, and the first bad day knocks all of them over together. There is more on this in how many habits to track at once.

Write the habit as a rule you can check at night with a yes or no. "No phone in the bedroom" works. "Less screen time" does not.
Find the cue. Bad habits run on triggers: a place, a time, a feeling, another habit. Phone in bed starts with the phone being on the bedside table.
Change the setting before you rely on willpower. Charge the phone in the kitchen. Do not keep the snack in the drawer. Delete the delivery app for a month.
Put something in the gap. Stopping a habit leaves a slot in your day. A book on the pillow fills the slot the phone used to.
Track it daily. A tick for each day you held. It takes a second and it turns a vague intention into a record you can see.
Plan for the miss. You will slip. One miss is a data point; two in a row is a new pattern starting. Get straight back on the next day.

That last step matters more than it looks. Most people do not quit a habit change because of one bad day. They quit because one bad day turns into a week of "I already broke it". The never miss twice rule is the short version: after a miss, the next day is the only day that counts.

How long it takes

Longer than the internet says. The popular "21 days" figure does not come from habit research, and in the study most often quoted, the time for a new behaviour to become automatic varied widely from person to person. There is a full breakdown in how long it takes to form a habit. The practical point: judge the change after a couple of months, not after two weeks, and expect the early days to need effort.

Some habits are easier to stop in a fixed block with a clear end. A no sugar challenge or a Dry January gives you a start date, an end date and a box for each day, which is easier to commit to than "forever". When the block ends, you decide what to keep.

The short version

A bad habit is a repeated action that costs more than it gives. The cost is in the repetition.
Most common ones cost sleep, money, health, time or the people around you.
Pick one, write it as a yes or no rule, and find its cue.
Change your surroundings first, then put something in the gap.
Tick each day you held, and never miss twice.

If you want a place to tick it off, add it to BeHabitual as an "avoid" habit: you confirm each evening that you held, and the month view shows which days slip. It is free.

What are some examples of bad habits?: Common ones include scrolling your phone in bed, hitting snooze, coffee late in the day, a bought coffee every workday, sugary drinks, smoking, drinking every evening by default, sitting for hours, checking messages constantly, and running late. Most cost sleep, money, health or attention.
What is the most common bad habit?: There is no single agreed answer, and rankings online are mostly opinion. Phone use is a strong candidate because it is the cue for so many others: scrolling in bed, checking messages at work, and being on a screen during meals and conversations.
How do you break a bad habit?: Pick one habit, write it as a rule you can answer yes or no each night, and find its trigger. Change your surroundings so the habit is harder to start, fill the gap with something else, tick off each day you held, and after a slip, get back on the next day.
How long does it take to break a bad habit?: It varies a lot from person to person, and the popular 21-day figure does not come from habit research. Plan on a couple of months before judging whether a change has stuck, and expect the first weeks to take the most effort.