Make sticking to your new ritual way easier
Originally published on blakestratton.com
Here’s how I’ll define a ritual: a collection of “good for me” habits ordered specifically and repeated regularly.
Creating rituals is one of those things that feels so easy, yet always proves to be sneaky-difficult down the stretch.
Rituals are especially difficult because you’re grouping together actions that are “good for you.” If they were already easy to do, you wouldn’t call it a ritual. Nobody boasts about their morning ritual of hitting the snooze button then checking their Facebook feed for 20 minutes.
New rituals tend to fail because it’s nearly impossible to start more than one habit at a time. And your ritual may be 3, 4 or 10 habits put together.
So here’s what I’ve done to make new rituals much easier to incorporate in my life.
- Make a checklist of the every part of the ritual.
- Make this checklist incredibly easy to access.
- Resolve to check the list and nothing more.
Instead of trying to start 5 habits at once, start only one habit: check your list. Decide what your trigger is (waking up, arriving at the office, opening Facebook, craving junk food, etc.), then decide to do nothing more than look at your ritual checklist. Make only that commitment. Once you look at it, it will become way, way easier to begin to do the things on the list.
But really, check your list.
On your 3rd or 4th day of doing this, the temptation will sound like this: “I know everything on the list, no need to check it.”
Beware! Here’s why you should check it anyway:
- It’s all about cognitive load. It’s not about whether or not you can remember, it’s about training your brain to be an action taker, not a storage closet. By trying to call to mind your list, you’re actually using up valuable decision power that needs to be reserved for the “good for me” things on your list.
- Affirmation. When you’re starting a ritual or replacing a habit, usually no one is around to pat you on the back for a job well done. When you actually check things off of your list, you’re sending positive reinforcement to yourself which helps make the behavior stick. I even put a positive affirmation at the bottom of my checklists that I read over myself out loud!
Weird? Sure. Effective? Heck yes.
