Last time I’ve wrote about using habits to back up goal achievement success. As usually tricky part with the habit is to be consistent with it. I don’t believe in perfect execution and I don’t want to beat myself up when I’m not consistent with the habit. So what do I do about this?
For every habit there are two phases: first we adopt new habit and then we sustain it.
I find adopting is the hardest part. During this phase it’s not only about adding a new habit to your life, but also adapting your routine and the habit itself. For example, I could start with an idea to have a certain new habit every workday and few weeks later realise that having it three times a week is a better option because this is less stressful. In life we often do compromises. When adopting new habit we should be ready for compromises as well.
Sustaining is not that hard. I tend to think that new habit moves from adopting to sustaining phase when I have a solid two month with new habit. Sometimes it takes longer if I struggle to be consistent with it during adopting period. This phase is basically simply repeating what was established in the first phase.
Here is how I get to a solid state for a new habit:
- Embrace that you will skip some days. It’s important to embrace from the very beginning that there will be days when you will skip the habit. I let myself skip one day without any bad feelings. It’s just how life works. I can’t always have everything. One day is not a big deal.
- When you skip a day, make this habit your priority for the next day. Second skipping in a row I consider as a failure path. So if I skip a habit, then the next day I make sure I do it. Depending on the habit this could be adding it to most important tasks for the day, adding an alarm on the phone, doing it first thing in the morning, etc.
- Don’t use skip day as a continues cheat. A pattern to be avoided is skipping a habit every second or every third day. What I want to see is a streak of 10-20 successful days which is occasionally broken with a skip day. That’s how for me a solid habit looks like.
- Change the habit if you struggle to adopt it. When I see I can’t be consistent for 2-3 weeks while adopting a habit, that’s a sign that I need a major change. This could be changing number of days per week, time in a day, and even the habit itself. For example, few years ago I decided I want to be in better physical form so I was adding a workout habit. Originally I wanted to have a workout every workday. Few weeks later I realised I need a rest day between workout days. So I switched to three days a week. And this worked great.
I use “don’t miss two days in a row” approach for several years and since then I don’t feel any stress when I skip a day. I find lowering the stress level is the most useful part of such approach.