Start small and do less — Forming habits for life

TL;DR

• Start with the smallest possible way of doing the habit
• Slowly increase intensity/duration of the habit
• Decrease the intensity/duration any time you miss a session
• Write out the progression from smallest intensity to the maximum intensity, with as many steps as possible and reference when increasing/decreasing.
• I still don’t have any solid advice for motivation yet, soz

For me, maintaining a habit is about starting with the smallest version of the habit that’s possible. Giving yourself no excuse to do it every day. Then slowly increasing the duration or intensity of that habit. Whilst decreasing the intensity if you’re not doing as well as you should be.

I’d like to focus this post on the scale of “smallest version” and “it’s ok to decrease intensity in order to maintain regularity”.

Start so small you can’t fail

Here’s a few examples of the “smallest version” of a habit:

• Meditation — 1 deep, mindful breath a day
• Exercise — 1 sit up a day
• Dieting — Leave 1 mouthful of something you don’t want to be eating a day. Or have 1 mouthful of something you want to be eating.

The most important thing when maintaining a habit is regularity. Getting it to become part of your day, so it feels instinctive, you begin doing it subconsciously. Over time this reduces the amount of mental effort needed to start the habit. So you’re more likely to keep it. If you try and do too much, you’ll end up finding excuses not to complete your habit. So start with something you can still do, no matter what mood you’re in or how little time you have.

It’s ok to do less

Every January we see people signing up for the gym, going a few times a week and end up doing nothing by week 3. This is the problem of not starting small and not decreasing intensity when it becomes too much. I had this with my daily meditation practice. I started small, with 1 breath a day and kept increasing the amount I’d do to about 15 minutes. I kept this up for around 6 months and then suddenly stopped doing any meditation at all. I had got myself into a mindset where I thought it was failure to do less. And I was finding it harder at the time to complete my 15 minutes. As a result I just gave up completely, rather than winding down.

Had I realised I was struggling and started decreasing the time I was meditating, even if it went all the way back down to 1 breath again, I probably wouldn’t have stopped when I did.

Keeping track

To effectively increase or decrease the intensity of your habit, you need to know all the steps in the progression and track when to go up or down.

One way to do this, is to write out a list of all the steps. Starting with the smallest version, and ending with the most you want to be doing. With as many steps in-between as you can make. Whilst using a habit tracking app, such as Habitica, to track your streaks (number of times you did your habit without a break). When you get to a certain number in the streak, like 5 in a row, then you increase to the next step. If you miss even a single session, go down a step.

I haven’t been able to find a good app that can handle this increase/decrease automatically. For now you’ll need to do this bit manually, or maybe combine Google Forms and Google Scripts if you like a cheeky bit of coding.

What I’m not sure of yet

One thing I still haven’t figured out as well as I’d like to is motivation. I found a few methods for hacking motivation, but they haven’t worked too well for me:

• Gamification — Using a habit tracking app that turns doing your habits into a video game (check out Habitica)
• Social pressure — Telling friends and family about your habit goals and updating them on progress
• Betting against yourself —
  Actually putting money on the line if you don’t keep up with your habit goals (See Beeminder)
• Rewards — Giving yourself treats and rewards when you reach a certain streak