If You Want to Develop New Habits, Create Fewer Habits.
The more habits you try to create, the harder it is to maintain them.
I’ve known this for a while. Last year, I created a spreadsheet to help me keep track of myriad life metrics (sleep, nutrition, etc.) as well as activities and habits that I wanted to prioritize. It was one of those deals where, if I followed this habit, I would turn the camera green; if i didn’t, i painted the cell red.
I quickly realized that there is no completely green day . In other words, there is not a single day in which I go in for sports and read a book and chat with a friend and practice the piano and go to bed on time and so on.
This is one of the reasons I’m not a huge fan of don’t break the chain habit trackers. It’s enough for me to hit five days out of seven .
What was interesting was to find out what habits I get rid of when life gets stressful. Although I love my piano, practicing is often one of my first habits; I feel like I’m adding more work to all my other work.
On the other hand, exercise is usually the last thing to disappear. I can let everything else slide while I continue my morning yoga practice and weekly Les Mills classes – and on days when I’m too busy to get into the YMCA, I’ll settle for “as long as I can go for a 20 minute walk.”
It turns out there are many benefits to maintaining basic habits even during tough times. As Jackie and John Coleman explain in the Harvard Business Review :
The past year has been a time of radical prioritization for us. We are constantly optimizing – defining our most important priorities and actions, reluctantly and painfully to cut down on important but not urgent matters.
[…]
Daily or weekly habits aligned with your long-term goals can keep you on track even when it’s hard to think ahead, and can add stability during these volatile times. We each have regular practices that we try to maintain to structure our lives, stay mentally and physically healthy, and ensure that we approach life with awareness. Important at all times, these habits are essential in our busiest and most chaotic times.
Even when times aren’t tough, identifying your core habits (versus your more desirable habits) is critical. I recently started using the Exist app, which uses data to determine the correlation between your various activities – for example, my resting heart rate rises when I consume less protein.
Exist also lets you track habits and other custom tags, and I ended up catching new start syndrome and creating a whole bunch of new habits and tags that I wanted to track.
Well.
It turns out that adding all these addictive new habits made it harder for me to stick to my core habits simply because there are too many habits you can give up before it’s time to complete “going to bed at the same time every day”. ” habit.
So I stopped, rejected and re-prioritized.
This does not mean that you cannot add new habits or that you need to kick one old habit before you can acquire another. Habit experts like James Clear suggest building your habits one at a time and combining them together to improve both your fulfillment rate and efficiency:
A stack of your morning routines might look like this:
- After I pour my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for sixty seconds.
- After sixty seconds of meditation, I will write my to-do list for the day.
- After I write the to-do list for the day, I will immediately begin my first assignment.
But before you do any of this, it’s worth asking yourself what core habits are most important to maintain, no matter what happens.
That way, you can build the rest of your life around them – and when the rest of your life gets in your way, they’ll still be there.