The Method
New Habits, New Hope is a distraction-based method for sobriety and addiction recovery, created by Yasmin Goetz after her own recovery from alcoholism. It is built for people who want to change without AA meetings and without $150-an-hour therapy: instead of fighting a craving with willpower, you replace it with something small and good until the old habit loses its grip. You can read the full origin of this method on Yasmin's story page, and see the products built around it in the shop.
Our Mission
To make sobriety and habit change accessible to anyone, regardless of income, without shame and without a program that demands you announce yourself to a room of strangers. New Habits exists because the two most common paths — AA and clinical therapy — don't work for everyone, and the people they don't work for deserve a third option.
How the method works
Distract
The moment a craving hits, your brain is looking for relief. Instead of white-knuckling through it, you give your brain something else to hold onto immediately — a mint, a piece of candy, a page of a book, a game on your phone. The goal isn't to think your way out of the craving. It's to give your hands and your mind a job to do until the wave passes.
Replace
This isn't a one-time trick. Every time you choose the new habit over the old one, the new habit gets a little stronger and the old one loses a little of its grip. This is just how the brain forms and breaks patterns — no willpower mythology required, no relapse shame if it takes a few tries.
Live
You don't have to identify as anything, attend anything, or spend money you don't have. You don't owe anyone an announcement about your sobriety. You just start with one small replacement, today, and you keep going.
Our Philosophy
We believe recovery doesn't have to look like one thing. AA has helped millions of people, and if it's working for you, we're not here to talk you out of it. But it doesn't work for everyone, and neither does clinical therapy at $125–$150 an hour. New Habits was built for the people in between — the ones who know they need to change but haven't found a way in that fits their life, their budget, or their personality.
Yasmin is spiritual, and faith carried her through parts of her recovery that nothing else could reach. But New Habits doesn't require faith, and it isn't preachy about it. Whatever gets you through the next five minutes without the thing you're trying to quit — that's a new habit worth having.
Where this is going
Right now, New Habits is in its first phase: a story, a method, and a shop of affordable products that support it. Phase two is bigger — a free weekly Zoom community for people who want to change together, and eventually, nonprofit status so this work isn't limited by what an affiliate shop alone can fund. You can follow along and be part of that next phase from the homepage.
