🚀 Why “Just Try Harder” Keeps Failing You
☀️ Sol Bites: 7 Steps to Redesign A Bad Habit
🎁 Bonus Tips
🔍 Why Functional Analysis is Underrated
📜 Words of Wisdom
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Picture this: It’s late one evening, and you’ve told yourself you weren’t going to do That Thing tonight. For you, maybe that means stress-eating, doom-scrolling, or “just checking email” instead of working on a side project you’ve been hyping for three years. And yet, here you are, doing That Thing. Again.
When most of us find ourselves in a moment like that, we default to a standard internal monologue: I need more willpower. I need more discipline. What’s wrong with me?
It can be painfully frustrating, but clinical psychologist Tom Horvath—the past president of the American Psychological Association's Society of Addiction Psychology and founder of SMART Recovery—came up with an idea that basically throws a polite hand grenade at the whole notion of discipline. His pitch: Stop moralizing your behavior, and start doing what’s called a functional analysis.
The premise is incredibly simple. Every behavior you keep doing (even the ones you hate) is doing a job for you. For example, it’s solving a problem, easing a feeling, getting you something you want. If it weren’t, you’d have stopped already. So instead of treating yourself like a broken machine that needs fixing, ask yourself: What is this behavior’s job? And is there a less-destructive way to get it done?
Why “Just Try Harder” Keeps Failing You
Behaviorists have been using functional analysis for decades, and it follows an ABC framework:
A — Antecedent What’s the cue or trigger? (Stress after work, boredom, a specific time of day, etc)
B — Behavior What is the thing you’re doing?(Eating, scrolling, avoiding, etc.)
C — Consequence What is the immediate payoff and the eventual cost?
Most of us miss that the immediate consequence is usually a win. Stress-eating ice cream at 10 PM genuinely makes you feel better (for about 90 seconds). Doom-scrolling genuinely distracts you from existential dread (for maybe 45 minutes). Procrastinating on writing your book genuinely protects you from the discomfort of writing something that might turn out bad.
The behavior works. That’s why you keep doing it. The problem isn’t that you're weak, it’s that you’re solving the wrong problem.
Horvath frames it like this: When someone walks into his office talking about their stress and overeating, his job isn’t necessarily to fix them—it’s to fix the situation that is driving the behavior. The truth is, what they’re doing isn’t uncommon, and if you’re doing it, too, you’re not broken. In fact, your environment is asking your body to do something, and your body is delivering.
Reframing your behavior that way matters because it changes what you do next. While willpower says, “Resist harder,” functional analysis says, “Redesign so you don’t need to resist.”
Keep in mind, willpower is not a particularly reliable employee. Your goal is to give it as little work to do as possible.
Sol Bites: 7 Steps to Redesign A Bad Habit
Try this plan to prevent yourself from engaging in one of your annoying habits.
1. Pick one specific behavior that you repeat.
Specificity is key here. Focus on something like, I eat half a bag of chips between 9 and 10 PM.
2. Map the ABC
Get curious, not judgmental. For a few days, note when the behavior happens and write down the following details:
What was happening right before? (Were you tired? Stressed? Did you just get off work? Did you have an argument earlier in the day? Things like that.)
What did the behavior actually look like? (Note where, when, how much you did, and with what.)
What did you get from it—immediately? (Think about feelings such as relief, distraction, or numbness. Or maybe it gave you a break.)
What did it cost you—eventually? (Keep track of feelings like guilt or sluggishness, or perhaps you lost time.)
The immediate payoff is the part you’re going to need to replicate elsewhere.
3. Ask: What job is this behavior doing?
Be honest and a little generous with yourself here. The behavior is solving something. Common answers to this question might be:
Getting me out of my head
Giving me a reward after a hard day
Avoiding a feeling I don’t want to feel
Filling silence or boredom
Signaling something to other people
If you can’t figure out what it’s doing, ask: What would I lose if this behavior just disappeared overnight? That’s usually your answer.
4. Brainstorm other ways to get the same thing
This is where most people short-circuit, because they jump straight to “I’ll just stop.” Don’t do that. Instead, list 3–5 alternative ways to deliver the same payoff. If the job is “Getting out of my head,” you might list running, creative work, and good conversations. You probably have a list already, but you’ve never named the activities as functionally interchangeable with the bad habit.
5. Redesign the setup, not just the moment
This is the part most people skip. Don’t just plan to “do the better thing instead” at 9 PM—that’s still relying on willpower at the worst possible moment. Look upstream. Can you:
Change what your afternoon looks like, so 9 PM lands differently?
Pre-stage the alternative? (Running clothes by the door; snack ready at 4 PM; the writing document open from the morning)
Remove the path of least resistance? (Don’t keep the chips in the house, or always sign out of the app where you doom-scroll.)
You’re trying to make the situation do the work, so willpower has almost nothing to do.
6. Run it like an experiment, not a verdict
There’s a chance that you’ll try everything above and you don’t find it effective. Your goal is to observe what you can observe, and build on whatever you discover. You’re not “trying to be a better person.” Think of yourself as a scientist gathering data on a system. If something flops, that’s information, not failure. Adjust and try again.
7. Lean into your strengths instead of attacking your weaknesses
Most of us, when we have a problem, charge directly at the weakness. Functional analysis suggests something more like the economics of comparative advantage: Figure out what you're already good at, and use that to solve the problem indirectly. For instance, if you’re writing a book, you may already know that the middle chapters are lacking. You don’t need to develop a brand-new skill in that case, you just might need to start somewhere you’re strong and let the rest assemble around it.
Bonus Tips
Some discomfort is just the cold-water adjustment period. Horvath uses the analogy of wading into ocean waves: It’s freezing for the first 20 seconds, then you’re fine. A lot of “I don’t want to do this” feelings are actually just that entry threshold. Willpower’s real job isn’t sustaining a behavior—it’s getting through the first 60 seconds until the thing takes over and carries you.
You’re always writing the story you'll tell later. Anytime we go through something significant, we’re simultaneously composing the story we'll tell about it. Reframing a hard moment as “This is going to be a great story someday” genuinely helps process it. It's not toxic positivity—it’s giving the experience a shape.
Connection is the original behavior. Humans are descended from people who spent enormous portions of their day just being together, e.g. laughing, singing, hanging out. A lot of the behaviors we’re trying to “fix” are partial substitutes for connection. Sometimes the answer to “why do I keep doing this thing” is closer to “because I’m a little lonely” than we want to admit.
Why Functional Analysis is Underrated
The reason functional analysis is so underrated is the same reason it’s so effective: It isn’t sexy. It doesn’t promise a transformation. It doesn’t require you to dig up your childhood, manifest your goals, or download an app. It just asks you to slow down enough to look at what your behavior is actually doing for you—and then to redesign your situation so you can get that thing some other way.
Stop treating yourself like a broken machine, and start treating yourself like a reasonable person doing reasonable things in response to your circumstances. Then change the circumstances.
You’re not lazy. You're not weak. You’re not lacking willpower. You’re just running an old strategy that used to work, in an environment that’s no longer set up to support a better one.
Pick one behavior. Find the function. Redesign the setup. Run the experiment.
Then go from there.
Before you beat yourself up for “self-sabotaging”.
Words of Wisdom
A bad system will beat a good person every time.
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