Beyond the general prescription of Torah study as an antidote, a specific Talmudic passage (Berakhot 5a) sets out four sequential remedies for a person struggling against the evil inclination, cited in later ethical literature as a practical program rather than a merely theoretical account.
The first remedy is to incite the good inclination against the evil inclination, read as directing a person to consciously marshal reasoned resolve against the impulse rather than hoping it passes. If that fails, the second remedy is to occupy oneself with Torah study, on the premise, stated elsewhere in rabbinic literature, that sustained engagement with sacred text crowds out and weakens the appetite it is set against. If study alone does not suffice, the third remedy is to recite the Shema, invoking the declaration of God's unity as a direct verbal counterweight to a divided, appetite-driven will. And if even that fails, the passage prescribes a fourth remedy: to remind oneself of the day of death, on the reasoning that few desires survive close contemplation of one's own mortality, since most transgression trades a lasting fact for a passing satisfaction that only looks attractive when death is kept out of view.
Later ethical writers, particularly in the Musar movement founded by Israel Salanter in the nineteenth century, built entire disciplines of habituation and reflection on this Talmudic sequence, treating it as evidence that rabbinic Judaism required concrete, escalating technique rather than willpower alone, an emphasis Musar writers contrasted with what they saw as an excessive reliance on intellectual study divorced from deliberate character work.