Building Healthly Habits
Throughout my entire life I've struggled to stick to habits long term. Recently, I've started contemplating the process of developing habits to understand why I struggle and create a way to succeed.
Recently I’ve struggled with sleeping. The slightest sound will wake me up. So, at the beginning of 2023, I started wearing earplugs to sleep. This instantly fixed my sleeping problem and putting in earplugs quickly became a necessary step before bed. But, on many occasions, even months in, I’ve still noticed myself getting into bed before putting in the earplugs, which has made me contemplate just how hard it is to build habits.
Putting in earplugs before bed is a necessary habit for me. If I don't do it, I won't sleep through the night. Even after three months of wearing earplugs nightly, I still get into bed without them. If a simple one minute task like that is so hard to habitually do every night, no wonder developing more complicated habits is so challenging.
No matter how much we want to do something, doing a new task on a regular basis can be extremely challenging. My entire life I’ve been demoralized for not being able to develop healthy habits. I always start, fail, and get upset with myself for not sticking to it. Maybe, if i cut myself some slack, accept that I might skip a habit occassionally, and do my best on as may days as possible, I might stick to it long enough for it to become a habit.
There are a few habits I have been trying to build. Working out consistently, reading consistently, and adding “decompression time” to the end of each day. These habits, unlike earplugs, are not a quick task. Working out is a 30 minute to hour long task I want to complete about three times a week. Reading requires full focus for a decent bit of time, multiple times throughout the week. And building a decompression routine has been a task and a half.
If doing the same short task every day is hard enough, I need to understand that it will take even longer to develop more complicated habits. If some weeks I workout less or one night I miss a decompression session, I shouldn’t give up altogether - when I forget to wear earplugs one night, I just start again the next night (if I don't wake up in the middle of the night to put them in).
Overtime, the effort of attempting to be consistent even through failures will create consistency in and of itself. Even though I forget earplugs some nights, most nights I remember to put them in. If I skip a day of reading, or a week of a blog post (or weeks as of late), I shouldn’t give up on building those habits. I should stick to my goals and accomplish what I want as often as possible.
With this new way of thinking about the process of developing habits hopefully I get less demotivated by missing a day and instead focus on starting again immediately. Maybe sharing my struggles will also help other people who struggle with building habits to know, you are not alone.