I have tried many times to change my behaviour, habits, and thought patterns, to varying degrees of success. I have had times where I've felt like I am hard wired to be a certain way and therefore incapable of change, but really that is not true. This is a reflection on TWO ways that I change how I act.
TLDR: For small things I find a 'have-to' and glue all the related 'want-to's' onto that. For big things I need to actually think and plan and find workarounds to perceived barriers.
Before I gave up social media my phone time was about 6 hours per day. Absurd. I had two main reasons to dislike this; when I went out I was not taking in my environment at all, and I felt like I did not have digital privacy. I decided to give it up in phases. First I deleted the accounts for the apps that I did not have any real reason to stay on. The two remaining apps were YouTube and Instagram. I had friends on Instagram that didn't have my number, and on YouTube I do genuinely learn things. I gave the friends my number, and kept the accounts for both, deleting the apps from my phone. I was only able to use these on my PC, changing the passwords to big strings of characters that I could not memorise saved to my password manager, with plans to delete my Instagram account once my friends moved to texting me.
I think this only worked because I had reasons to change, and thoughtfully planned around the barriers I saw instead of letting them be reasons to stay stagnant. Keeping the two that I did have reason to use on my laptop forced me to be intentional about using them. If I wanted to check Instagram I had to either plan to bring my laptop with me, or wait until I got home, then go to my desk, turn it on, sign in, blah blah blah. YouTube wasn't able to be background sound while I walked around the house. The digital privacy aspect of this also stopped me from wanting to pick them back up once I got over the initial hurdle. I still don't use any of the things I deleted.
This was about two years ago now, and I have since tried (successfully and not) to change a bunch of different things. I find if I have one thing in my day that takes any amount of discipline to maintain, it is much easier to start a new thing by sticking them together. I think this is a real thing and called habit stacking. At one point I really struggled to look after my skin in the evenings, since I would go straight from daytime things to eating dinner, then getting into bed. All it took for me to change that was having a real want to be in the bathroom for something in the evenings, which unfortunately was eczema that I wanted to get rid of... Regardless, I started going to the bathroom before bed to get my stuff for it, and while I'm there I might as well wash my face, and then I have to let that dry before I can moisturise my face, so I started to brush my teeth then. Now it's routine, even though I don't have to do the eczema thing anymore.
Habit tracking has been surprisingly difficult for me, since it feels like a whole new chore on top of everything. I used to use notebooks, they sucked if I stayed at someones house and had to back-fill. Before that I used phone apps, but then I went super digital minimalist. This year I caved and started the phone apps back up, but it is the only way I can do it, and it feels really good to see that I'm on track. I use onrise.