Your Habits are your future.
— Steven Bartlett
One can make out the future of a person by looking at their habits.
That’s the reason you should always focus on building good habits and replacing bad habits with less addictive ones.
But, we all have one same problem: Habits don’t stick….
Isn’t it?
I’m sure you might be motivated someday to make up a habit. You even did it for some days, but eventually broke up with your streak.
Then, you end up being demotivated and procrastinating for long hours on how to build habits or some other things….
That’s something which has happened with me, too.
When it comes to writing, my streaks have been broken two times, one it was a 30 day long streak and the other one was about 20–25 days.
But, I have been able to build a habit of moisturizing my skin for about 74 days.
Here’s what I have learned in the journey of building my habit for moisturizing my skin daily even if I’m getting late for school.
Focus on the journey and not the destination.
I’ve never thought of moisturizing my skin as an habit that I need to do for 256 long days to get established.
I never thought of the destination that I wanted to reach, but I focused on my journey of moisturizing my skin everyday.
I will rather say I never thought about it much, it just became natural.
How?
By incorporating it into my routine.
Everytime I come from a bath in the morning, I automatically moisturize my skin.
Coming from bath is a trigger for my brain that it’s the time to moisturize my skin.
So, when you incorporate your habit into a specific routine like : you will perform your X habit when you do Y, you will be automatically able to see results.
Todoist
If in any case, I even forgot about moisturizing my skin, I have added a task for everyday for moisturizing my skin on Todoist.
It’s a very easy and 2-min task, so even if I forget about it, it reminds me up.
That helps me remind that I need to perform this habit of moisturizing my skin.
What’s your why?
I had a habit for drinking warm water in the morning daily for about 56 days, but it broke.
Why?
Because I didn’t knew why I am doing so, I just heard it’s good to drink warm water in the morning, so I did. But never had a real why.
On the other hand, moisturizing my skin always had a big why.
Which is to hydrate my skin, keep my skin healthy and look attractive.
That’s a big reason, this habit is able to stick for so long.
One habit at a time
I’ve fall in the trap for trying to establish 7–8 habits at the same time, but at the end, I was only able to establish the habit for moisturizing my skin.
So, always go for establishing one habit at a time. You can’t establish a lot of habits at the same time.
I know you want to establish all of them, and can’t resist to cut down any. Even, I too have felt it.
But, in the end what sticked was just one habit.
So, try establishing just one habit from the start.
But if you want to establish a lot of habits, then my suggestion would be —
- Cut down as much as you can.
- Still, if you’re left with a lot of them, try to work them on all together, most of them will be left behind automatically, the way it worked for me.
I hope this helped you gain insights about how you can establish good habits for long period of time.
If you found it to be valuable, you can follow me on my various social media handles to recieve more valuable and practical insights from me : Linktree
