50 Bad Habits: Top Unhelpful Habits Everyone Should Quit

Bad habits examples include doomscrolling in bed, sleeping less than seven hours, procrastinating, impulse spending, and saying yes to everything. A bad habit is any behavior you repeat on autopilot that gives you a quick payoff now and sends you the bill later, in your health, time, money, or relationships.

Most of them do not feel like choices, and that is the point. In a 2022 review in the Annual Review of Psychology, psychologists Bas Verplanken of the University of Bath and Sheina Orbell of the University of Essex argue that strategies built on giving people information and changing their attitudes take too little account of how habits actually work. That is why this article focuses on changing the setup around a habit, not just on knowing better.

At Moore Momentum, we look at life through the 5 Core Areas of Life. They are Mindset, Career and Finances, Relationships, Physical Health, and Emotional and Mental Health. Every habit you have, good or bad, feeds at least one of them. Thinking in all five helps you spot where a bad habit is costing you, and how one habit can spill into the others.

Below you will find 50 examples of bad habits sorted into five categories, the science on why they stick, and a simple way to break any of them without giving up your phone. You will finish with a short to-do list you can start today.

What Counts As A Bad Habit

A bad habit is an automatic behavior, set off by a familiar cue, that works against a goal you actually care about. Three quick tests help you spot one.

• You do it without deciding to. Ask yourself why, and the honest answer is "I don't know, I just did."

• The payoff is instant and the cost is delayed. You get relief, a laugh, or a hit of novelty now. You pay in lost sleep, money, or momentum later.

• You would not choose it on purpose. If you planned your ideal Tuesday, it would not be in it.

Not every habit on this list will be a problem for you. A drink with friends on a Friday is not the same as drinking to switch off every night. Frequency and control are what turn a behavior into one of the habits to break.

50 Bad Habits Examples By Category

What are some bad habits holding you back right now? Scan this list of bad habits and count how many feel familiar. You will probably spot a few of these common bad habits right away. That is not a reason to feel bad. It is your starting map.

The 50 bad habits examples below are split into five groups. Phone habits come first because they touch every part of your life. The other four line up with the 5 Core Areas, with Mindset and Emotional and Mental Health sharing one group. Each habit gets one line on what it costs you, so you can find yours fast.

Bad Digital And Phone Habits

Your phone is not the villain. The default settings are. Most of these can be fixed with settings instead of willpower, and our guide on how to reduce your screen time walks you through it.

1. Doomscrolling in bed. Scrolling bad news or endless feeds long after you meant to be asleep. Here is how to stop doomscrolling for good.

2. Checking your phone the second you wake up. Your morning starts reacting to everyone else's priorities before you have set your own.

3. Leaving every notification on. Each ping is a cue that pulls you into an app you did not plan to open.

4. Phubbing. Short for phone snubbing, it means looking at your phone while someone is talking to you.

5. Opening the same apps on a loop. Social, email, social again, without looking for anything in particular.

6. Letting autoplay pick your night. One more episode turns into four, and tomorrow pays for it.

7. Comparing yourself on social media. Measuring your everyday life against someone else's highlight reel.

8. Answering work messages at all hours. Your workday never gets a clear finish line.

9. Using your phone to escape every quiet moment. Lines, elevators, and pauses in conversation never get a chance to just be boring.

10. Saying "just five minutes" and meaning an hour. The time estimate is part of the habit, and it rarely holds.

Bad Health And Sleep Habits

11. Sleeping less than seven hours. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends at least seven hours for adults. Yet the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics found that 30.5 percent of US adults slept less than that in 2024, including 27.2 percent of adults ages 18 to 34.

12. Going to bed at a different time every night. Nothing tells you the day is over, so the scroll decides for you.

13. Hitting snooze over and over. You start every day by breaking a small promise to yourself.

14. Smoking or vaping. Cigarette smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease, disability, and death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

15. Drinking to switch off. When a drink becomes the only way you know how to unwind, the habit is doing the steering.

16. Eating every meal in front of a screen. Food turns into background noise, and you barely register what you ate.

17. Sitting for hours without getting up. Long stretches at a desk or on the couch without a single walk break.

18. Leaning on energy drinks to cover a short night. It patches the tired feeling and leaves the sleep problem in place.

19. Skipping checkups. Putting off the dentist or the doctor until something hurts.

20. Biting your nails or picking your skin. Classic stress habits that run on autopilot when you are bored, anxious, or deep in thought.

Bad Mindset And Emotional Habits

21. Negative self-talk. The running commentary that calls you lazy, behind, or not good enough.

22. Overthinking small decisions. Taking 20 minutes to choose a lunch spot burns energy you needed somewhere else.

23. Procrastinating on what matters. Doing easy tasks to feel busy while the important one waits.

24. Perfectionism. Refusing to start, or to finish, until it is flawless.

25. Replaying past mistakes. Rewatching old failures on a loop instead of taking the lesson and moving on.

26. Blaming everyone else. It keeps you in what Moore Momentum calls a Fixed-Victim mindset, where life happens to you, instead of a Growth-Owner mindset, where you own the next move.

27. Complaining on repeat. Venting feels good for a minute and then becomes your default setting. Here is how to break the complaining habit.

28. Pushing the start date back every week. "I'll start Monday" becomes the place good intentions go to wait.

29. Numbing stress instead of handling it. Reaching for snacks, scrolling, or shopping to escape a feeling rather than deal with its cause.

30. Avoiding anything uncomfortable. Skipping the hard workout, the tough email, or the new class because it feels awkward.

Bad Work, Study, And Money Habits

31. Multitasking during deep work. Toggling between tabs and chats while trying to finish one hard task.

32. Starting your day in your inbox. Your best hours go to answering other people's questions.

33. Cramming the night before. Leaving all the studying for one late, stressed session.

34. Saying yes to every request. Your calendar fills up with other people's goals.

35. Working through every break. Lunch at the keyboard becomes the norm, not the exception.

36. One-tap impulse buying. Saved cards and next-day shipping make spending feel effortless. See the bad spending habits that keep people broke.

37. Never checking your bank balance. Avoiding the number does not change it.

38. Using buy now, pay later for small purchases. Four easy payments feel small until you have five plans running at once.

39. Running late. Showing up 10 minutes behind tells people their time matters less than yours.

40. Letting your digital workspace become a junk drawer. A cluttered desktop and dozens of open tabs make every task start with a search.

Bad Relationship And Social Habits

Social habits are sneaky because you often see them first in other people's reactions, not in your own behavior.

41. People pleasing. Saying what others want to hear instead of what you mean.

42. Listening only to reply. Planning your answer while the other person is still talking.

43. Interrupting. Finishing people's sentences, even when you are right about the ending.

44. Gossiping. It feels like bonding, but it teaches people you will talk about them too.

45. Avoiding hard conversations. Small issues grow when nobody names them.

46. Canceling plans at the last minute. Once is life. Every week is a pattern.

47. Holding grudges. You carry the weight long after the other person has moved on.

48. Letting friendships live only in the group chat. Reactions and memes slowly replace real catch-ups.

49. Oversharing online. Posting first and thinking about it later.

50. Taking the people closest to you for granted. The people who show up for you get your tired leftovers.

If any habit on this list feels out of your control, especially smoking, vaping, drinking, or picking at your skin, talk to a doctor or a licensed therapist. Some behaviors are more than habits, and you do not have to handle them on your own.

Why Bad Habits Are So Hard To Break

Bad habits are hard to break because they run on cues and repetition, not on what you know. Verplanken and Orbell's 2022 review argues that information and attitude change take too little account of how habits work, so knowing a habit is bad is not enough on its own to stop it.

Real-world data shows how stubborn habits get. A 2023 study in PNAS led by Anastasia Buyalskaya, now at HEC Paris, with researchers at Caltech and the University of Pennsylvania analyzed more than 12 million gym attendance records. Gym-goers whose visits had become highly predictable responded less to an intervention designed to get them to go more. Once a behavior turns into a habit, it starts to tune out rewards and nudges.

You may have heard that stress makes you fall back on your habits. Early lab studies pointed that way, but when Tom Smeets and colleagues at Tilburg and Maastricht universities ran two exact replications in 2023, they could not reproduce the effect. So treat that idea as unsettled. Either way, a habit runs on its cue, so the cue is where you start.

Every habit runs on the same four-step loop of cue, craving, response, and reward. Interrupt the loop and you give yourself a chance to choose.

How To Break Any Habit On This List

Knowing bad habits examples is step one. Changing them takes a system. Moore Momentum uses 3 Momentum Boosting Methods to build Golden Habits, the small, high-impact habits that move you forward. To break a bad habit, you run the same 3 methods in reverse.

The goal is not to quit your phone or white-knuckle your way through every craving. It is to make the bad habit harder to start and less satisfying to finish, while the replacement gets easier.

Worked Example - Breaking The Morning Phone Check

Let's take habit number 2 from the list, checking your phone the second you wake up, and run it through all three methods. You can swap in any habit from the list and follow the same steps.

Step 1 - Spot The Cue And The Payoff

Every habit has a trigger and a reward. Here, the cue is the alarm going off on the phone already in your hand. The payoff is a quick hit of something new, plus a way to put off the day for a few more minutes. Write both down. You cannot change a loop you have not named.

For three mornings, just notice. Which app do you open first? How long do you stay? How do you feel when you finally get up?

Step 2 - Make It Invisible And Unattractive

• Schedule a Sleep Focus on iPhone or Bedtime mode on Android, so overnight notifications stay silent until a set time. With fewer alerts waiting, you face fewer cues.

• Move social media and email off your first home screen. Put your alarm, a notes app, and a music or podcast app there instead.

• Set your lock screen wallpaper to your one priority for the day, so the first thing you see is your plan, not someone else's.

Step 3 - Make It Hard

• Use Downtime in Screen Time on iPhone, or a scheduled Focus mode in Digital Wellbeing on Android, to pause social and email apps until 30 minutes after your alarm. On iPhone, turn on a Screen Time passcode and have a friend set it, so Ignore Limit is not one tap away.

• Sign out of the one app you always open first. Typing a password gives you a moment to choose.

Step 4 - Make It Unrewarding

Start by noticing what the morning scroll really feels like. For three mornings, ask yourself how you feel 10 minutes after it, and write the answer down. If the honest answer is "drained" or "behind," you have just made the habit a little less attractive.

• Give the payoff to a Golden Habit instead. Open your notes app and write the one thing that would make today a win, then make the coffee, open the blinds, or stretch while your first song or podcast plays. You still use your phone. You just use it for your morning instead of against it.

• Reward the new routine. Check off your one priority when it is done, and let the feed be the treat after your morning routine, not the start of it.

Then give it time. The popular 21-day rule is a myth. A 2024 systematic review from the University of South Australia found that new health habits took a median of 59 to 66 days to become automatic, with individual people ranging from 4 to 335 days. The 2023 PNAS study of gym-goers and hospital workers found the same kind of spread, with gym habits taking months to form and handwashing habits taking weeks. The old cue will keep firing for a while. Expect slips. A slip is data, not a verdict. Once this works for one habit, repeat the same four steps for the next one on your list.

At Moore Momentum, we treat that first win as the spark that moves you out of a Failure Loop, where each slip makes the next one easier, and into a Success Loop, where each win makes the next one easier. The goal is a ripple that reaches all 5 Core Areas of Life, from your mindset to your relationships.

WHAT TOP BAD HABIT IS SABOTAGING YOUR MOMENTUM?

You just scrolled through 50 bad habits, and here is the catch. The one costing you the most might not even be on your radar yet. The Core Values Quiz finds it for you. In 60 seconds, it shows which of your 5 Core Areas of Life is causing the most friction, and the hurdles quietly stopping you from leveling up. Every strategy in this article comes from the Moore Momentum System, which uses AI to personalize your Golden Habits, strip out the friction, and spot obstacles before they knock you off course.

Ready Player One? Your next level starts with one honest answer.

FIND MY TOP BAD HABIT NOW

Conclusion 

Bad habits examples are everywhere once you start looking. Doomscrolling, short sleep, procrastination, impulse buying, people pleasing. None of them make you a bad person. They are cue-driven loops your brain learned through repetition and reward, and the same science that built them can take them apart.

You do not need to fix all 50. The morning phone check shows the pattern. Spot the cue and the payoff, then run the 3 Momentum Boosting Methods in reverse. Make it invisible and unattractive, make it hard, make it unrewarding, and hand the payoff to a Golden Habit instead. Win with one habit, and that win becomes momentum you can carry into the rest of your 5 Core Areas of Life.

Here is your to-do list for today.

• Circle three habits from this bad habits list that you do most weeks.

• Pick the one that costs you the most, and write down its cue and its payoff.

• Make one change from each of the 3 Momentum Boosting Methods in reverse before tonight.

• Choose a Golden Habit that gives you the same payoff in a better way.

• Give it at least two months, and treat every slip as feedback.

• Want a plan built around your own life? Open Claude or ChatGPT and paste this prompt. It will ask you a few questions, then build your plan.

Act as my habit coach. I want to break one bad habit. Before you give any advice, ask me these questions one at a time and wait for each answer. Which bad habit do I want to break? When and where does it usually happen, and what sets it off? What do I get out of it, such as relief, a break, or something to do when bored? What does my daily routine look like, from when I wake up to when I go to bed? Then give me a step-by-step plan using Moore Momentum's 3 Momentum Boosting Methods in reverse. Method 1 is make it invisible and unattractive. Method 2 is make it hard. Method 3 is make it unrewarding. Give me 2 or 3 specific changes for each method, built around my routine. Then suggest one Golden Habit, which is a small positive habit that gives me the same payoff in a healthier way, and tell me exactly when to do it. Keep every step realistic for someone who uses their phone all day. Change what my phone shows or does instead of telling me to give it up. Finish with a simple plan for my first 7 days and what to do when I slip. If my habit sounds compulsive or harmful, tell me to talk to a doctor or a licensed therapist.

FAQs About Unhealthy Habits

What Are 10 Bad Habits?

Ten common bad habits are doomscrolling in bed, sleeping less than seven hours, checking your phone the moment you wake up, procrastinating, negative self-talk, impulse buying, smoking or vaping, people pleasing, sitting for hours without moving, and complaining on repeat. Which ones matter most depends on your goals. The best way to use any list is to pick the habit that costs you the most and change its cue first.

What Is The Most Common Bad Habit?

There is no official ranking of the most common bad habit, but short sleep is one of the best measured. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics found that 30.5 percent of US adults slept less than seven hours in 2024. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends at least seven hours for adults.

What Are The Hardest Habits To Break?

The hardest habits to break are usually the ones with a strong, frequent cue and a fast reward. Think smoking or vaping, late-night scrolling, or stress snacking. A 2023 PNAS study led by Anastasia Buyalskaya found that gym-goers whose behavior had become highly predictable responded less to an intervention meant to change it. The more automatic a habit gets, the more deliberately you need to change its cue.

What Are Some Good And Bad Habits Examples?

Good and bad habits often come in pairs. Checking your phone first thing is a bad habit, and setting one priority for the day is a good one. Doomscrolling in bed is a bad habit, and a set wind-down time is a good one. Impulse buying is a bad habit, and waiting 24 hours before a nonessential purchase is a good one. Swap each bad habit for a good one that meets the same need.

What Are Bad Habits Examples For Students?

Common bad habits for students include cramming the night before, studying with notifications on, scrolling in bed on school nights, multitasking during lectures, putting off big assignments, and comparing grades or lives on social media. Most of them are set off by cues, so the fix is the setup. Silence notifications during study blocks, keep a regular bedtime, and break big assignments into short daily sessions.

What Are The Worst Bad Habits For Your Health?

Smoking tops most lists. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that cigarette smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease, disability, and death in the United States. Short sleep matters too. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics notes that poor sleep health has been linked to conditions including obesity and depression. If a health habit feels out of your control, talk to a doctor.

What Are Bad Work Habits Examples?

Bad work habits examples include starting the day in your inbox, multitasking during deep work, saying yes to every request, working through every break, running late to meetings, and answering messages at all hours. Each one trades long-term focus for short-term relief. Pick the one that hurts your best work the most and build a replacement, such as a 30-minute focus block before you open email.

Why Are Bad Habits So Hard To Break?

Bad habits are hard to break because they run on cues and repetition, not on what you know. In a 2022 Annual Review of Psychology paper, Bas Verplanken of the University of Bath and Sheina Orbell of the University of Essex argue that information and attitude change take too little account of how habits work. That is why they point to changing the setup around a habit, not just knowing better.

How Long Does It Take To Break A Bad Habit?

There is no fixed timeline, and the popular 21-day rule is not backed by the evidence. A 2024 systematic review from the University of South Australia found that new health habits took a median of 59 to 66 days to become automatic, with individuals ranging from 4 to 335 days. That review studied building habits, not quitting them, so treat it as the timeline for your replacement habit and expect a few slips along the way.

Medical And Mental Health Disclaimer

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical or mental health advice. The author is a habit formation and personal development expert, not a licensed medical doctor, psychiatrist or healthcare provider.

Health and behavioral claims discussed here are based on published and emerging research and should not replace professional medical or psychological consultation. Some claims remain preliminary and require further scientific validation. Individual results may vary.

Before making any significant changes to your health, wellness or daily routines based on this article, consult a qualified healthcare professional, especially if you have existing injuries, cardiovascular conditions, an implanted device, are pregnant, are recovering from surgery, or are managing a diagnosed mental health condition.

If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or having thoughts of self-harm, contact your local emergency services or a crisis line immediately. In the United States you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. This website is not equipped to handle medical or psychiatric emergencies.

Commercial Disclosure

Moore Momentum offers the habit-building systems, productivity tools and subscriptions discussed in this article. The author and the company have a commercial interest in these products.

Our tools are consumer wellness and productivity tools. They are not medical devices and are not cleared to diagnose, treat or prevent any condition. Product mentions describe only features that are live today. Content is written to be as accurate, balanced and transparent as possible, and our medical review process operates independently of our commercial operations.