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5 Things That Will Help You Build a New Habit (and 3 Things to Avoid)
Congratulations — you made up your mind to implement a new habit in your life. How do you not over-complicate it?
Sure, every habit change is a big deal because we are making a promise to ourselves that this time, things will be different. We are beginning a new month with more optimism. Less procrastination, more action. A new beginning. A future version of us that’s beckoning us to come along for the ride. Make a list, we think. Write about it in our journal. Tell our friends we’re going to make it happen, starting today.
And then, somehow, we trip ourselves up. We wake up late one morning, and now we have to hurry. There’s little time to do that new thing. Or we try it and it seems too much too soon, so we get discouraged. We ask ourselves if we have what it takes to make this change, or if we will revert back to the old way of doing things. We indulge in more and more negative self-talk. We delay, we re-procrastinate, eventually we quit.
What happened?
We over-complicated the habit change and by doing so we repeated a cycle of self-sabotage, making sure that we can’t possibly introduce even one positive change into our life. Sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s more common than you think.
