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When we get started with new habits, we invest a lot of time into developing muscle memory and training ourselves for particular skills, behaviors or though patterns.
In order to have new habits settle into our livelihoods, we need to work on it periodically for a while… Until we do not.
Life will inevitably happen and when it happens, we just might break our habits, we might break the streaks of daily behaviors we’ve built.
When that does happen, how will we act then?
Why breaking streaks happens
Why breaking streaks happens
Whatever habits we’re working on (be it meditating, not eating sugar, running, drinking more water, going to bed early, etc.), we have to do just that: work on them; Repeatedly!
There’s no way around it.
We need repetition, we need to build the habits from the ground up, we need to do them on the daily, we need a daily, weekly, monthly streak.
But whatever the reason, we sometimes break our habits.
Maybe your best friend has a birthday party and you can’t go to bed as early as you’d like, maybe someone in the hospital has had an accident and you can’t journal as much.
The list of reasons is endless.
The only thing we need to understand is that we will inevitably screw up.
That’s part of life.
So instead of beating ourselves up, we just might work on how we deal with it when it will happen.
Why it’s not the end of the world
Why it’s not the end of the world
If we do know it will happen, we might as well accept it as part of the process.
Instead of going on a downwards spiral, instead of beating yourself up because there was a day when you ate sugar and now you broke a 3 month streak, maybe, just maybe you should actually enjoy it.
Maybe instead of being all angry at yourself because you forgot to journal yesterday, you could put that energy into journaling today.
Don’t get me wrong, there are circumstances where a broken streak may be an actual bad thing, such as giving up alcohol, or not smoking.
For the most part, in most of the habits we may want to develop, we don’t suffer consequences that are that important.
At the end of the day going or not to the gym for one particular day will not matter in the grand scheme of things.
When you zoom out from this very moment, when you look at your whole life, eating that cake today won’t be the end of the world… But that doesn’t mean breaking a streak won’t mean that a new streak of bad habits may start forming.
How to proceed after a broken streak
How to proceed after a broken streak
You said you’d go to the gym daily.
Yesterday you’ve been so busy, so exhausted and so sick that you were bearly able to take a breath, let alone have a workout.
We need to recognize where we are, we need to spend a few minutes allowing ourselves to indulge in fuck ups, we need to offer ourselves acceptance, freedom and intentionality to do or not do our habits and most importantly forgiveness for screwing up.
We are the ones we have to ask for forgiveness to and have to accept the forgiveness from.
We can beat ourselves up for days on end for not going to the gym, or we may just accept it, decide on our next course of action and enjoy our decision and our current day.
Whenever such a fuckup happens, we may take a mental note and design our life systems so that fucking up the next time will be impossible.
Here are a few suggestions:
-Focus on the reasons that lead you to break your streak (think not of the habit you did not do, but rather the motivation behind your actions);
-Redisign your systems so it is impossible to screw up (think of how you can set up your routine around your habit so that failuare is impossible);
-Apply the 2 day rule (allow yourself room to not do your habit for one day at a time, but not more than 2 days in a row);
-Just say fuck it (In the end, nobody makes it out alive. If you didn’t go to the gym because you had a party, or you don’t eat your vegetables because it’s Christmas, just indulge, let loose and have some fuck);
Photo credits:
Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash
Photo by Benjamin Lambert on Unsplash
Photo by Olesya Grichina on Unsplash
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