You built the habit properly. You know that because it worked for weeks. Then one thing changed, the habit stopped, and now you’re wondering if that means you failed. You didn’t. One disruption doesn’t mean you have to abandon everything.

stopping and starting.

When I started running, if I didn’t run on a Monday there was no point running any other day that week. I’d wait until the next Monday to start. It was arbitrary, but it was a real story I told myself. I could run for a couple of weeks, miss one Monday, and suddenly I’d convinced myself I’d missed the whole week. Then it would be two weeks. A month. This is why I was a stop-start runner for over 15 years. I knew what was happening but found it hard to break my habit of breaking my habit. 

I wish I’d known then what I know now. I wouldn’t have tied my run to the day of the week; I would have removed the all-or-nothing trigger of a Monday and found a different way to trigger my run. At one point, I would take my kit to work and run home. That was a good trigger, and I only talked myself out of it a few times.

the pressure to be perfect.

Putting yourself under pressure to be perfect is often the underlying problem with inconsistent habits. If I didn’t run on a Monday, I wasn’t going to perfectly follow my plan for the week. So, I ditched the plan. When you think of it that way, it’s no longer surprising that I stopped and started for so long. The pressure to be perfect stops us from starting, even though we all know perfection doesn’t exist.

This doesn’t just apply to running. A client I worked with wanted to build their own website. They knew what they wanted to say, the pages they wanted to build, but months had gone past and it hadn’t taken shape outside their head. They were striving for perfect, but nothing was happening. They set a daily habit to write one sentence after they ate their breakfast. They set their laptop up in the kitchen, so it was visible and easy to access. When they washed their dishes, they walked to their laptop and wrote a sentence. It still wasn’t perfect, but the goal was to get the pages written, then they could be edited. Five days later, they had five sentences. Five sentences that hadn’t been written in the previous months.   

when things move.

One of the hardest things I’ve found about building habits is the natural inconsistency in my life that creates inconsistent prompts, which means inconsistent habits. This is my biggest frustration. I recently did 33 days of yoga and then moved to a different location for 10 days. My prompt wasn’t gone exactly I still ran and wanted to do yoga afterwards. Nothing had changed about my intention. My routine and environment had changed, and that was enough to interrupt the habit. Also, part of my successful 33-day streak was down to my yoga mat and iPad being available in the space I did my session. That wasn’t possible when I moved.

missed isn’t broken.

An all-or-nothing approach is what helps me to create habits. Usually this is unrealistic and this is why it took me years to figure it out. I needed to think about things differently. All-or-nothing was fine to focus me and start me off, but I always need a plan B.

My Plan B is usually to accept one missed day but to treat two missed days as a signal to take action. Viewing one missed day as proof that you can’t do something, evidence that it’s not working, is an unhelpful position to take. I find it’s more helpful to consider why I didn’t do it, be objective about whether it was unavoidable and go from there. Learn and move forward.

The other advantage of plan B is that I’ve decided in advance what I’ll do if I miss a day. It takes the negotiation out of the equation, which stops me from considering how I feel. When you consider how you feel that’s when words like ‘failure’ and ‘I can’t do this’ come into play. 

it’s not personal.

Breaking a habit stack doesn’t immediately mean it was badly built. Sometimes life changed. Your routine changes. Your environment changes. None of that means you’ve failed. If you’ve built a stack using a reliable prompt, your new action is tiny and there’s only one of them, then you’ve given yourself a good starting point. It wasn’t built to be perfect. A strong habit isn’t one that never gets interrupted. It’s one that’s easy to restart.

If your habit stack’s fallen apart and you’re not sure whether to rebuild it or start again completely, book a free introductory call and we’ll work out which one it needs.