We’re one week into 2016 and I think this is the right time to get you back on the horse so you can achieve your New Year’s Resolution you set previously.
Like most people, when you first started with your new goals you were very motivated to do it and get it done, but as time passed stuff kept getting in the way, you didn’t feel like it or you just had to take care of something else. You had to visit your family and friends for a week and couldn’t do it. You eventually end up beating yourself up about it and just giving up. Don’t give up just yet, I think I have the right thing to get you going again.
The thing is, we are creatures of habit and we tend to do the same things every day and week with very small variations. For example yesterday you went to the water cooler at work at 9:12 AM and today you went at 9:26 for example. Or you had your coffee at 8:14 yesterday and 8:20 today. What is happening to you right now is that your old habits are stronger than the new activity you are trying to introduce into your daily routine. Your results up to this point are the average of all the things you have done until now.
Get that average up
Baring this in mind, the method I have used is very simple. I call it: “Just do it this time!”. It is exactly what it’s called. There’s no point feeling bad about the fact that you weren’t able to do the thing you said you wanted to do for the past week or two. You have just come to your senses and remembered you wanted to make a change in your life and have the time for it. As this is all about averages, it’s far more important to do something, anything, even imperfectly than not doing it at all. If your average for the past week has been ZERO, if you do it this time, you will have done more than you did for an entire week before. You become a better person by a factor of one. You have improved in a measurable way. You just leveled up so to say. You’ve changed to you version V1.0.0.1.
How to level up
Creating a new habit takes a lot of willpower and energy. Replacing an old habit takes even more energy because you have to fight the pull of it. The basic idea is to get that average up. If you miss a day or two it’s not a big deal if at the end of the week or month your average goes up.
A good analogy for this effect is pushing a snowball up a hill. At first it’s very easy and it’s no problem pushing up against your old habit, but the more you push the more difficult it gets as the snowball gets bigger and bigger. Then after about 2 weeks of daily practice you start reaching the summit and it becomes a lot easier to push with every coming day. If you now go further the snowball starts going down the other side of the mountain and all of a sudden it starts pulling at you, you start feeling like you need to do it. This is the point at which the new activity you have been struggling with becomes your new habit. It becomes part of your daily life. It becomes you, the new you.
The thing is, this effect is not stationary. The first couple of weeks are the most important. If you don’t do it for long enough, the snowball starts rolling back the mountain and you have to start all over again and because it’s a snowball and it got bigger it usually also pushes you back a bit. This is why increasing the average is far more important than blaming yourself for not doing it “enough”, “right” or “perfectly”. You are building momentum, you are slowly changing and old habit with a new one and this takes a lot of mental energy and motivation.
If for example, you decided to work out 5 times a week to get in shape. Try for the first couple of weeks to average 1-2days/week. After that try going further and further until you eventually reach the 5 days/week. At this point it’s become part of your lifestyle and you exercise 5 days/week.
Because changing habits is such a difficult job (most addictions are also a form of habit) it’s not recommended to try and change more than one of them at a time. Anytime you make a very large change in your life you end up getting extremely stressed. If you remember the time you got your first job. It took you about 1-3 months to get back in the groove of things. It took you that time for you to adapt to the new habits that had to get in place.
Start with one
The best practice for creating or changing a habit is to only focus on one of them at a time. You can try to change 5 things in your life at once, but it won’t work as well as you’d expect. You will end up struggling to get started in all of them and not get anywhere with any of them. So focus on just one for 1-2 months, get it locked in place and then move to the next one.
Think about it, in 1 year you could be building anywhere form 6 to 12 new habits into your life. What would happen if these habits were based on what you wanted in life. How grate could your life look like in one year’s time if you regularly did all the things you know you should be doing every day to make your life better? How would you look like after one year of setting new habits? It makes a huge difference in all aspects of life.
So don’t beat yourself up. Just do it this time!
