To change a behavior, you can’t just focus on the behavior itself. Instead, you have to address the felt experience of the rewards of that behavior. If all we needed to do was to think our way out of a behavior, we’d just tell ourselves to stop smoking, stop eating cake, stop yelling at our kids when we are stressed, stop being anxious in general, and snap! it would work. But it doesn’t. The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value.
