While the start of a new habit is full of excitement and enthusiasm, sticking to it for the long haul is where most of us fail.
Prior to the year 2020, I was bad at sticking to habits. I would set new year resolutions but would never end up sticking to any for longer than a week. This ended up making me feel guilty.
Guilty because I would start with a lot of enthusiasm by getting the right tools and materials. Over time, all of these would be sitting right in front of my eyes, and every time I looked at them I would feel bad.
Then came the year 2020 when the pandemic hit all of us were locked down in the four walls of our homes and had nowhere to go. This is the time I got onto reading the book 'Atomic Habits by James Clear', watched a few youtube creators and started learning French on Duolingo. All of these resources helped me form a few good habits and I was able to stick to each of them until now which is 1.5 years later.
I'm pretty sure you would know that any new habit takes about 21 days to form and sustain. However, the real question is how do we stick to doing the habit for over 3 weeks? As per my experience, I have hardly been able to sustain a habit for over 2 weeks prior to 2020.
So, let's talk about the 6 Guaranteed Ways to Stick to a New Habit.
1. Allot a Specific Time and Place for the Habit
Allot a fixed place and time to carry out the habit. This may sound basic but trust me it's super helpful. It was more evident to me during the pandemic as we had such a restricted movement within the four walls of our house.
The workplace location merged with the where you would usually decompress, to sometimes where you would sleep or share a meal with your family. Your brain would have had a difficult time processing where the workplace ended and personal life began. It was as though the two got merged into each other.
This made me realise that having a dedicated spot in the house to work, and leaving that spot soon after signing off for the day, helped the brain process that work time has ended and now I can switch to personal or family time.
I applied the same technique to my habits. For example, daily reading is to be done just before going to bed, practising the new language on Duolingo is to be done soon after signing off from work. I hope you're getting the gist.
Having a dedicated spot and time for each activity helps your brain process that it's now time. So, you would automatically do it. Do test this out and let me know if it works for you?
2. Set Short-Term Goals
In my experience, setting short term goals for your habits work best to remain consistent. They give you immediate validation and feedback that you're going in the right direction. They make the goal achievable and realistic.
Be sure to set goals that are doable and in your full control rather than having an influence on external factors such as dependency on other individuals or systems.
So, setting weekly or biweekly goals such as you would complete 5 lessons from a subject or do 20 push-ups by the end of this week, finish reading one book. These would be realistic and achievable. Once, you achieve a week's goal, you would also get the push to continue doing it for a longer duration.
3. Don't Skip It for More Than 2 Days
We are humans and are full of feelings. I do get that sometimes we may not feel like doing the activity and skip it. Skipping a habit for a day or two is alright. But be sure to do it on the third day if you have been missed doing it for two consecutive days.
This is super important because the drive to do the habit reduces considerably once you skip it. And it becomes even tougher to start again.
I have been guilty of this. If I have not practised the habit for over 3 days, it would most likely never happen again. Alas! All the prior effort has now gone down the drain.
4. Reduce the Friction
I learnt this technique from my favourite creator Ali Abdaal. The idea is to reduce the friction between the task at hand and you. You would need to keep the object close to you in your sight and reachable.
How this works is, if you want to learn to play an instrument, for example, keep it within your reach and visibility. So, every time you see it, you know that you have to practice playing on it. Try not to keep it hidden inside a cupboard or another room.
How this worked for me is I always leave my kindle on the pillow. So, I know that once I'm on my bed, I need to pick it up and start reading. I have been able to finish reading so many books with this simple trick.
This is a great way to trick your brain to complete the task. As you would know out of sight means out of mind. So, keep the things you want to do in your sight. And you will end up doing it.
5. Habit Stacking
I picked this technique of Habit Stacking from 'The Atomic Habits' where, it says that if you want to stick to a habit, stack it with your other daily habits.
For example, if you forget to do your skincare at night, one way to stack this habit is to do it soon after you are done brushing your teeth at night. So, each night when you brush your teeth, you would also remember that your next step is skincare. This is habit stacking where one tiny habit follows the other right after. This is really simple and works each time.
6. Reward Yourself from Time to Time
If you have been able to stick to the habit for a week or two, be sure to reward yourself. Give yourself a pat on the back, enjoy a great meal, give yourself an extra hour to watch movies. Do what you enjoy the most.
This will help you stick with the habit for the long run and you will not lose motivation or feel like you're stretching yourself too much.
One other way is to maintain a habit tracker although I don't really use it. It makes me feel overwhelmed and anxious if I'm not able to do them once in a while. However, you could give it a try and see if it works for you. You make your own rules.
One last thing I would mention is to make this your mantra " Consistency Compounds Over Time " and watch the wondrous results that it brings to you.
That's about it, you guys.
I hope you found this helpful and are able to build and stick to new habits. Do let me know if these pointers helped you. If there are other ways, that have worked for you, drop them in the comments below and I would be happy to test them.
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Until next week,
Hugs!
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