Sticking With a New Healthy Habit Depends on Changing This Mindset
Starting a new healthy habit is easy. Sticking with that habit is the hard part. It’s not necessarily hard because doing the work to stick with the habit is hard, although it may be. It’s hard because most people approach healthy habits with an all or nothing mindset.
This all or nothing mindset makes you believe that you must be perfect for it to be worth it. One or two bad days in a row of not sticking with your new healthy habit and it is game over. This all or nothing mindset then becomes the excuse to give up trying. Instead of working to continuously improve on how long you can stick with your healthy habit, you use the first bad day you have as a reason to give up completely.
If you want to build a new healthy habit, you must approach it knowing from day one you are going to have a lot of bad days, and that’s just part of the process. Building good habits has nothing to do with being perfect and everything to do with persistence. This means your ability to stick with a healthy habit only depends on your ability to keep trying after a bad day.
You may start with sticking with it for just 1 day. Then you make it to 2 days in a row, then 3, then 4 and so on and so forth. Every time you reach a new streak record of sticking with your healthy habit consistently track it. New streak records are wins. However, with every win you may experience one or more bad days soon after.
The mindset during a bad day is to just keep persisting. Think about how tomorrow you will tack on one more day and start a new streak. Then when you start the new streak, each day motivate yourself by counting the days you need to beat your record.
This is the process for sticking with a healthy habit. Simply stated, eliminate the all or nothing mindset and replace it with a persistent mindset. That’s it.