Most books and articles on thrift advise people to cut down on expensive habits - the habitual Starbucks coffee, smoking cigarettes, drinking too much alcohol. But the problem with habits is that they are really hard to break, so you do them anyway even though your conscious mind tells you not to.
In order to break habits, you need to identify patterns of behaviour. Perhaps you only smoke cigarettes at certain times of the day, or the need to drink is associated with watching the news each night. Or perhaps it's certain emotions that trigger the need for comfort chocolate or coffee. To find out the pattern, you need to keep a diary where you identify the times you do certain things, what else you were doing at that point, and your mood/feelings at that point. Also total up how much the coffee/cigarette/glass of wine costs each time you indulge.
Once you have identified the patterns, you need to try to disrupt them. Deliberately change your routine, or practice substitution eg pouring a glass of coke instead of wine when you sit down to watch the news, or chewing gum each time you feel like a cigarette.
Breaking habits is extremely hard. For simple non-addictive habits, it takes a good three weeks of constant effort to break the habit. For addictive habits, it's a lot longer, as the withdrawal from the addiction triggers physical symptoms. Even Obama had trouble stopping smoking. There is a lot of help - the NHS has a special smoking programs with advice on how to quit.
One way to motivate yourself is to open a special saving account and deposit the money in every day that you would have spent on cigarettes/wine/coffee. An online account is best for this, as you can make the transfers every evening. As the money builds up, you should start to get a tangible sense that you are making progress, because it is visibly quantified, as opposed to nebulous.