How To Maintain Your Habits When Travelling
--
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.”
— Aristotle
Even without changing circumstances, sticking to your healthy habits can be challenging.
When you move from the comfort of your home and change your environment, a lot of things are no longer in your control. Thus, it’s difficult to remain consistent and stick to activities that bring us closer to our goals.
These difficulties can come in different forms:
- Jet lag
- Not having access to a gym
- Not having access to the food you need for your diet
- Not having enough time
And the list can go on.
We usually get stressed because we cannot keep up with the things that have become a part of our routine, and that are essential for our daily performance — mainly because we’ve invested weeks, months or years implementing them in our life.
The main problem here is that the more you delay a specific behavior (especially if it’s the one you are currently forming) — the longer it will take you to get back to it once you return home.
However, there are a few things you can do to make traveling (or any environment change) much smoother, and enjoyable.
Here’s your plan on how to maintain your habits while you are traveling.
1. Prepare Your Mindset
When you decide to travel somewhere, or you know that you won’t have access to your usual essentials, you need to set the right expectations.
In case you know your schedule in advance, plan out when do you want to commit time to your habits.
In case you are not familiar with the entire schedule, be flexible and take it easy if you’re not able to do something at the time, quantity or quality that you would typically do.
In these moments, ditch your typical timeline and try to do the habit whenever you can.
2. Prioritize Your Habits
Not all habits are made equal.
If you usually have 4–6 habits you do every single day, try to pinpoint the ones that have the most significant impact on your life.
Sometimes your travel days will allow you to do two of them, sometimes five.
Do your best not to get frustrated when you cannot commit time to all of them.
3. Create Your “Habit Travel Pack”
Once you figure out which habits you want to focus on, the next step is to adapt them to the type of travel.
For instance, if you usually workout for 2 hours in the gym and you don’t have access to the equipment you typically use while traveling, you want to create a routine you can perform at least a few bodyweight exercises.
It’s not perfect, but it will do.
You should do this for every other habit so that you have them ready whenever you need to travel and use the available resources in the best way possible.
Final Thoughts
Ideally, you would want to stick to your every habit and do it as efficiently as possible, but when changing environment and circumstances that might not always be possible.
In these moments it’s easy to give up, but since consistency is what you’re after here, try to approach this with from a minimalistic side.
Let me give you an example.
When I was trying to establish a habit of reading before going to bed, I was traveling a lot and working hard which made me so exhausted that by the time I would hit the bed, I would immediately crash with the book in my hand.
To maintain my habit, I made a rule to read just 1 page before falling asleep.
One page a day, until my schedule, normalized a bit, and I finally managed to return to my usual ritual.
No matter the circumstances, you can find a way to get at least one step closer towards your habit, even if that means doing just one push up today.
