If you’ve ever wondered how to change your life, you may have asked yourself: why can’t I just stop being impulsive, even when I really want to? Impulsivity isn’t a will power problem. It’s a nervous system reflex.
In this post, you’ll learn how to change impulsive behaviors and you will also learn a practical 5-step system to train new automatic responses. This approach works for impulsive spending, emotional outbursts, doom-scrolling, stress eating, interrupting, quitting too fast, and more.
Why You Can't Actually Stop Doing Stupid Stuff
Have you seen this video?
The guy on the floor is learning how to fight, the coach keeps yelling “Just get up! Get up!” But the guy on the ground is literally being pummeled. “I am literally trying to get up,” he says. He’s “trying harder” but nothing is changing.
What’s going on? First, the coach stinks. And , you can’t just tell people to try harder to do a skill that they don’t have yet.
You’ve probably tried over and over to force yourself to stop, but even when it’s super important stuff, you keep falling back on impulsively spending, drugging, yelling, storming off, quitting, fighting, mouthing off or shutting down. …and if you’re here, all that reactivity is probably interfering with you being the person that you want to be.
Being more reactive or impulsive can be due to trauma loading, depression, anxiety, brain differences like ADHD or just lack of skills and practice. Regardless of what causes it, you can’t just try harder or use willpower to stop, this is most likely a reflexive nervous system response and you need to train a new reflex to replace it. It’s not that it’s impossible to change, it’s that lasting, sustainable change is different than most people assume.
You really can learn to train yourself to respond to these situations differently, so that you can be less impulsive, less reactive, and regain control of your life. In this post, you’re going to learn 4 steps to doing that.
Understanding Impulsivity and the Emotional Brain
OK, here’s the problem. When you’re impulsive, or reactive—when you act in a way that doesn’t line up with your values—what’s usually happening is the emotional brain is activating while the thinking brain is not engaged.
- You get criticized at work. You fear you’re not good enough. The fight/flight response kicks in and you defend yourself a little too aggressively.
- Or your kids just won’t listen! Anger takes over and you snap at them.
- You see a big sale and you spend way too much money. Excitement is louder than your budget.
- You’re stressed at work so you binge on sweets,
- Or you’re sad so you drink too much.
- Your boss pressures you to take on another project and you’re uncomfortable saying what you really think, you just submit and agree to do it. People pleasing takes over.
When you’re highly emotional, the thinking, moderating, planning part of the brain isn’t activated.
Plus, the emotional brain fires faster than the thinking brain. With ADHD, impulsivity is not a lack of willpower, it’s a brain difference. Your reactive amygdala fires faster than the thoughtful pre-frontal cortex.
And whether you have ADHD or you’re just highly emotional in the moment, you can’t just willpower yourself—in the thinking brain—to stop doing it.
Not only is the emotional brain much faster than the thinking part of the brain, but a lot of these behaviors are old habits that we’ve repeated hundreds of times in our life. This has built up thicker, smoother neural pathways that circumvent the thinking part. People-pleasing has become your default, or lashing out, or just buying the thing. It’s mental muscle memory. And you can’t just change muscle memory by “trying harder”—you have to rewire it.
3 Principles on How to Change Impulsive Behaviors
To stop being so impulsive, you’ve got to understand three essential principles of change.
1. Train Your Emotional Reflexes by Practicing Tiny Skills
In this video, the coach keeps telling the guy to try harder, but the guy on the ground doesn’t have the skills to “just get up”.
This is the first principle of changing impulsive behavior: trying harder doesn’t work. Learning new skills does. Look what a good coach does:
A good coach would teach him, little by little, the tiny skills to “get up. Move your hand here, let’s practice that. Move your legs this way, let’s practice that? Let’s analyze skilled fighters “getting up”.
The first coach has forgotten how he learned those skills for himself little by little. And he’s expecting the guy to already know how to do it.
We do this to ourselves all the time. We try to force ourselves to try harder, instead of learning a different skill.
If you want to stop being so reactive, you’ve got to build muscle memory for a bunch of tiny skills. It’s the same for learning how to shoot a basketball or be more patient or assertive. You have to break it down into tiny steps, practice each one until you’re good at it, and then put the pieces together. You need proper technique, visual aids, coaching, and then with a bit of practice you’ll build the muscle memory to be able to do it, even under pressure. You can’t just “try harder”.
So that’s the first principle, Willpower doesn’t work. You’ve got to train some new reflexes. And the way you do that is through practicing tiny skills.
2. Use Positive Actions to Change Impulsivity
The second principle is that our brains do not comprehend “don’t do that”. When we try to be “less impulsive”, that’s called a “negative goal” because it’s something you’re trying to subtract. The brain doesn’t know what to do with negative goals. There’s no action there. There’s no verb. So principle two for being less impulsive is:
“Stop it” is less effective than “do this instead”. You have to train yourself to do a different action.
You can see this demonstrated with toddlers. If you tell them, “Don’t hit the cat,” they have no idea what you’re telling them to do. The only action word there is “hit” and their developing brain just can’t process the “don’t” in front of it. A toddler does much better when you tell them what to do. “Use soft hands with the cat. Here let me show you.”
We adults aren’t much different. When we want to be less impulsive, we have to give our brian an action word. What are we doing instead?
- Quick example: when people train adults who have a tendency to hit their kids, they don’t tell them to stop hitting their kids. They tell them to replace that behavior with something to do – putting their hands in their pockets. Then eventually they’ll add on skills like taking a break, and authoritative parenting. But they start with a simple, “Here’s what you do instead.”
- If you have a tendency to yell, you’ll start by training yourself to pause, then build assertive communication skills
- If you have a tendency to spend money, we’ll replace that with a delay, and then budgeting and emotion processing skills.
3. Changing Impulsivity Takes Time
OK, so 1), you’re going to train some new reflexes, build new muscle memory; and 2), you’re going to add in a positive action word for what you’ll do instead. Here’s the third principle.
Progress is going to look retroactive. You’re going to go from (see poster, moving from R to L)
- Not realizing you have a problem
- Realizing it long after you’re messing up
- Realizing you messed up right as or right after you do it
- Noticing you’re about to mess up–but still doing it
- Finally being able to stop yourself right before you do it
- Being able to prevent many of the situations beforehand.
This process can take a few weeks. If you’re not “stopping it” right away, here’s how you’ll know you’re making progress.
Week 1–2: you’ll catch yourself after the reaction; you’ll get curious and learn from the situation and start to become aware of your triggers.
Week 3–4: you’ll catch the middle of the reaction; you’ll watch yourself doing the stupid thing and see it differently.
Week 5+: you’ll catch the behavior at the start— and you’ll actually be able to replace it with different behavior.
But even during weeks 1-4, when you’re still doing the behavior, you’re making progress towards being less impulsive, let me show you how.
We’re finally to the four steps to changing impulsive behaviors.
4 Steps to Change Impulsive Behaviors
1. Reflect on what went wrong
The first step to training yourself to act less impulsively is reflection.
In the impulsive moment, your thinking brain isn’t fully engaged. By writing or talking about an experience afterwards, you’re allowing the thinking and planning part of your brain to engage. You don’t want to ruminate or beat yourself up. You’re just going to learn from it.
You see this with sports. Coaches and players analyze the game afterwards, not to beat themselves up, but to learn from it.
Special ops, soccer teams, EMTs, business strategists and any high-performing team or person all use this reflection time to improve their performance.
Do this reflection with someone else or in writing, not in your head, because we’re going to look at triggers and thoughts.
Identify your triggers:
- Outside triggers: “The kids were just being so loud! So I yelled.”
- Inside triggers: “I was feeling so lonely, so I had to buy something to feel better.”
- Somatic signs: “I was tired, so I ate an entire box of donuts.” “I was overstimulated, so I shut down.” “I was excited and in a hurry, so I just bought all the things.” “My body was clenched with rage while driving, so I cut him off.”
It’s important to identify your triggers, but one of the things that people often get wrong is they think the trigger is the cause of their behaviors. “He triggered me, so I yelled.” “That situation triggered me, so I left”. Wrong. Between stimulus and response there is a space, a space to choose, a space to respond differently. The whole goal of noticing triggers is so that you gain so much awareness that you can choose to change your impulsive behavior. In principle #4 I’ll teach you a few ways to create more space. But right now, we’re still on reflection. We identified some triggers, now let’s look at your thoughts.
What were your thoughts that led to those feelings and actions?
- Blaming thoughts: “These kids are ALWAYS so rude. I had to yell to get their attention.”
- All-or-nothing thoughts: “My day is ruined anyway, why bother trying?” “I have so much debt already, there’s no point in sticking to a budget.”
- Catastrophizing thoughts: “This is never going to get better. I might as well quit.”
We clearly don’t have time in this video to do a whole course on CBT, but learning to catch those thoughts can be really helpful with replacing impulsive behaviors with healthier ones. (Check out my EP course for more on that, specifically videos 18, 19 and video 11 from my anxiety course.) For this video, I’m going to assume that you know how to identify automatic negative thoughts and replace them with something healthier. If not, you could sign up for my membership to learn how. I get it, this is complicated; but we’re going to break it down so it’s doable. You can learn how to be less reactive.
So as we reflect on our reactivity, we can explore what went wrong, what triggers led up to it, and what thoughts fueled it.
2. Rehearse the Behaviors That Will Change Your Life
After reflecting on what went wrong, it’s important to do this next step. You don’t want to dwell on your mistakes or get sucked into ruminating on your failures. Instead, get super specific on what you would do instead. Write it down. This is key! This is the beginning of rewiring your brain to do something different. For this step it’s really helpful if you have a clear idea of what kind of person you want to be. A values exercise can help with that.
Let’s use the example of the parent who yelled at their kids. Write what you would do differently.
Next time I would get down on the child’s level, I would put my hand on their shoulder, I would look her in the eyes and calmly say, “Jane, you need to go brush your teeth right now.” If she refused, then I would ask her what’s the matter, and listen to her needs. If I do that and she still refuses to brush her teeth, I’ll say, “Jane, if you don’t brush your teeth right now, you will lose a privilege tomorrow.” And then if she didn’t, then I would tell her that she lost a privilege tomorrow.
I think it’s great to keep some 3×5 cards nearby. Then, with each situation that comes up, quickly write down 3 things: what happened, what led up to it, and what would you do differently.
3. Delay: Build a Pause (Essential for ADHD)
Now in order to implement these new changes, there’s one more skill that is super super duper important, and that’s building in a new reflex to slow down. This has to be super simple and easy to remember. Do anything to buy yourself time.
My two favorite are:
- Taking a slow breath before saying anything.
- Or saying, “Hmm, let me think about this for a minute.” Or, “Let’s circle back on this tomorrow.”
When making a big decision, sometimes I just tell the person…
- “Let me check something before I answer.” Or, “I’ve got to talk to Ryan about that before I buy it.”
Another easy one is to say…
- “Hang on a minute, I need to use the bathroom.”
And of course you can just say
- I need a little break, can we come back to this in an hour?
Anything to help you slow down can give time for your thinking brain to catch up. It’s really important to practice this slow down button over and over, so that it’s muscle memory when it’s crunch time.
If you have ADHD or struggle with reactivity, you’re probably going to need some visual reminders to help you slow down and support your thinking brain, your executive function.
- Visual reminders are key, like a note taped to your credit card: “Did you check the budget?”
- Write on your hand, or make your phone lock screen say something like “Slow down.”
You most likely need to build in physical reminders and barriers to impulsive behavior.
- Don’t keep alcohol in the house or candy on your desk.
- Taking credit cards off your apps, so you have to get up and manually type in a credit card instead of buying stuff with one-click.
- Put your snacks in the freezer, so if you want to eat them, you have to wait until they thaw.
Give yourself space to slow down and think.
- A 30-second “undo send” setting on your emails.
- Have a rule that you don’t make any huge decisions like quitting a job, moving, or breaking up with someone without first getting a good night’s sleep.
- If your kids are driving you crazy and you notice yourself getting tense, give yourself permission to step outside the house for a moment.
The whole goal here is to increase the space between stimulus and response. This gives our thinking brain time to kick on and help us make intentional instead of reactive responses.
And that takes us to step 4.
4. Build a System to Change Impulsive Behaviors
These three principles are all fine and good, but just knowing about them doesn’t build any muscle memory. You have to build an intentional system to practice them. Check out my video on how to build systems to actually change. Basically, pick one skill per month to work on. Build a system with reminders, trackers, and accountability. Start practicing the skill over and over, in low-pressure situations. So for example, if you’re training yourself to pause more…
Make a tracker where you give yourself a check mark for each time you pause more. (I think it’s best to put this up on a wall and use a big red marker.)
Make it visual. Put it on your phone screen. Set reminders. Add in a cue (on calendar “This meeting might be stressful, take some slow breaths).
Start practicing:
- When the waiter asks for your order ☑️
- When an email comes in ☑️
- When your phone chimes ☑️
- When your kids get loud ☑️
Breathe first.
The goal here isn’t perfection. Perfectionism actually leads to more impulsivity with things like avoiding, catastrophizing or shutting down. Instead we’re focusing on learning, practicing. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn.
Practice your new behaviors in calm situations at first, gradually increasing the stress. For high-stakes situations, like standing up to your boss, role play calm, assertive behaviors with someone safe ahead of time. Role play it. Say it out loud in your room. Say it to your therapist.
Again, think of yourself like Seal Team 6. You’re going to practice responding in drills so that in the heat of the moment you can perform. After a relapse, write about it and write down what you would do differently. Tell someone. Practice it out loud. This is how you rewire reactive behaviors.
Use a growth mindset:
Be patient with your progress. Don’t beat yourself up, but do try something different. This is all an experiment. We’re here in this life to learn and grow, and every experience is an opportunity to learn something new. Be courageous and try again.
And a really important part of growth and learning is to get good at do-overs and apologies. Here’s a script you can practice: “Okay, that was fast. Can I try that again?”
I do this all the time with my husband. “Can we start that conversation again?” I’ll remember to calm down, to use a softer startup, to acknowledge his side of things and focus on solving this together.
Summary: How to Change Your Life by Managing Impulsivity
OK, I hope this was helpful. Let’s just review real quick.
If you want to actually stop doing stupid stuff to replace impulsive behaviors with really intentional, values driven behaviors, there’s 3 principles and 4 steps:
- “Trying harder” doesn’t work in the long run. New skills are better
- “Stop it” doesn’t help as much as Positive Goals – Name the action you’re going to do instead.
- Progress is like groundhogs day, it might take a lot of repetitions, but if you reflect and practice new skills after mistakes, you’ll start rewriting new behaviors.
4 Steps:
- Reflect on what went wrong. Identify triggers and thoughts.
- Rehearse- Choose a new behavior to replace the reactive behavior.
- Delay – build in a pause reflex
- Practice the new behaviors- in writing, in talking, in tiny moments. Track it, remind it, make it visual, use a growth mindset and get good at apologies.
That’s the system for how to be less impulsive.
I have several other videos that dive into these principles and skills, so check the video description for those links.
Here’s to you changing your life by changing your impulsive behaviors.
