8 Simple steps to stick to your habits

The idea of droning through life to end up 65 years old with 40 of them in 1 mildly unsatisfying but comfortable location terrifies me. Taking the same trip to work day in and day out, having the same issues for DECADES on end is enough to make me think about skipping all of that and volunterily becoming a bum. I'm still not sure I've given up on that sweet, sweet, concrete pillow dream. Not to minimize anyone's hardship, but a man can dream... However, while I still for whatever reason persist in trying to escape the rat race and live life on my own terms, it's become even MORE essential that I get my habits under control, since "our daily habits determine our decade's destination."

I've been adjusting my habits off and of for upward of 8 years, and evolved from a reckless party boy in my university days, to now having a color coded calendar, digital care on my mobile device, know where every dollar I own goes on a monthly basis and even remember birthdays. Here's how I manage to maintain these habits, from the perspective of keeping them up, rather than starting them new.

First thing I had to look into was the things that made me struggle with habit formation to begin with :

1. The ability to Opt out - For the most part it's almost impossible to make anything that you CAN'T opt out from, its built into life, but the ease of the ability to opt out is a huge part of making habit change difficult. This is what that looks like, you're building a gym routine, but you don't have enough gym wear to last the amount of days you'd like to go for that week, so what do you do? Most normal people just won't go that day, or the rest of that week. Especially if it isn't near to laundry day. This applied to almost every habit I tried to form, like journalling (woops don't know where the pen is, it'll take too much time), Drinking more water (Oh no, I don't have a filter and I don't want to drink out of the tap) and so on.

2. Losing Momentum for more than 2 days - Once I was able to get a habit on track, say for a solid 2 weeks or a month in to it, I noticed that the difficulty to get back in once I missed a day grew exponentially. I think we unknowingly assume that starting back at anytime is fine, a day is a day. But I don't think thats true. Starting back after missing 1 day is MUCH easier than starting back after missing 2 and that's much easier than starting back after 3. I think if you miss a week its basically like starting over for most people. This is another silent killer because life does get in the way.

3. Not paying attention to patterns - When I was building a consistent Morning workout routine, it was hard because it was before work, I'd always get about 2 months in then fall off and try again about a month or so later. Then again hit that 2 month mark. I started monitoring what I was doing and saw that not only with that morning workout, but journalling, meditating, anything that I tried that made it beyond that 3 month mark was basically LOCKED IN. I was going to do it for life. I think this is a really useful thing to do, because it worked on multiple levels. Seeing the problem and also seeing the solution.

4. Bad Foundational Habits -Things like drinking alcohol every weekend, sleeping poorly, not eating healthy. These were especially true for the gym, but it applied to most habits. Hungover its hard to think clearly enough to journal in any meaningful way, or to focus. These are the ones that should be taken care of as soon as some momentum get building in my opinion.

5. Setting the bar to high - Perfectionism is the plague of people like us. It has to be done right. I'll start the gym routine and go for 1 hour a day 5 days a week. It's basically motivation suicide. We underestimate just how busy life gets, how challenging things can be, we mistake effort and sacrifice for the same thing and assume it's just 1 bit of will power we're going to use. Everything has effort AND sacrifice tied in, and they work TOGETHER. So the willpower is really fighting 2 things at once.

6. Waiting for a 'Fresh Start' - this one actually upsets me quite a bit. I did this all the time, I'll get back into it at the start of next month. Then as next month rolls around, and life inevitably happens, get busier, get sick or something like that, the date gets pushed back, then distraction sets in and I decide I'm going to do something else completely. Its as if there's any difference between the start of the month being Tuesday March 1st, and Tuesday February 24th other than the date on the calendar and the mental shift. Making your own habit board is how I solved this. I just wipe the board clean, then start and I have the fresh start BOOM.

7. Being Around Reminders Of The Habit You're Trying To Break - Have you ever moved away from a group of people, become someone different, but when you return to see them again, they're treating you like the 'Old' you? Its my experience that being in certain places causes us to experience 'familiar stimulants' that then reverts us. This is something that I think applies to the rooms we're in, the people we talk to, the places we visit and so many other things, these memories trigger and catapult us back into bad habits. This is because of that effort and sacrifice we spoke about earlier I believe. It takes EFFORT to exert yourself as a NEW PERSON in an OLD SPACE and because habit change is something that inherently requires effort, this is just multiple layers onto yourself. Its probably easier to never eat McDonalds again, if you never set foot into McDonalds. Or easier to not play videogames, if you just don't have a console in your house.

8. Not Having a Maintenance Perspective - New habits are only habits as long as you continue to do them. For some reason I don't think we really grasp this when going onto the journey. I think we mostly see the 'result' and ignore that "the process is the result". When I approached meditation, after finally getting it into a really comfortable space in my life, one day it just wasn't any more. I was able to do it everyday for a year, but it fell off, for the main reason that most things in life fall off. I've come to find that almost everything is about process, and result is a symptom of process. Here's a brain jump I made and hope you'll relate / challenge it - "Decaying into disorder is the natural process of the world of matter. Anything left unmaintained will essentially rot, become dilapidated, die, or grow to create chaos and imbalance in a system it exists in. Because of this Maintaining is the only way to create 'order' or lets call it 'controlled positive sustainability'. Let me know your thoughts! And happy Habit Hacking!