Ways To Make Habits Stick

We've all been there before – trying to build a good habit or break a bad one.

It's a Sunday evening, you're all excited and pumped for the coming week. Be it to start reading books again or to cut off those late-night trips to the fridge. Elaborate plans were made on how you'll be able to follow through with it this time. Add in there the tons of motivational videos on YouTube you've watched to get you more pysched up. You're all set and ready to go.

Everything's going really well for the first few days but somewhere along the way things starts to waver. And then it completely falls apart. Again.

I've been in this position countless times and it's extremely frustrating. Doubt starts to creep in, and thoughts like "I just can't do it." or "Maybe this is just not for me." comes popping on top of my head.

I have tried a lot of hacks and tricks over the years, but these are the things that truly helped me make my habits stick.

Don't Make It Too Difficult, Especially In The Beginning

I get it, I've been there. You want to bench press twice your body weight while doing crunches after a 10 km run on a treadmill while reading about Game Theory. All under an hour, thinking you have to make up for all the lost time.

This is not sustainable because you're introducing a lot of stress to different areas, all at the same time. You will end up feeling exhausted and will quit after a week or two. Remember, the goal is to be able to do it long enough that it will feel weird when you have not done it that day – like brushing your teeth.

The key for me was not to make it too difficult that I will feel anxious just by the thought of doing it again. But also not making it too easy that I will feel bored after some time.

Track Your Habits

I resisted tracking my habits for the longest time because I'm thinking that it will feel too structured and it will just introduce unnecessary pressure to myself. But as I learned more about habit creation, I was suprised by the importance of having a healthy amount of external pressure. i.e an accountability partner

Since I'm the type of person who tends to keep my cards close to my chest, I didn't share it to a person but instead used an app – it has been two months since I started using Habitify as my habit tracker.

It's been really interesting for me seeing the trends and streaks I went through for the past eight weeks. Most of the time, just the cue of "not breaking the streak" is enough for me to keep going – it's so satisfying to keep the streak going!

Obviously, there are still days that "I don't feel like doing it". On these days, I just do less than what I normally do. For example, a reading session that usually lasts for 1 hour would turn into a 30-minute session. This felt like cheating when I started doing it because I do it just to "keep the streak alive" but then I was validated by a recent Tim Ferriss video.

Thanks for making it this far, hopefully you found some value in this. And yes, writting on this blog is one of the habits I'm trying to build.