Read · 6 minutes
Habits that
actually stick.
Success shows in many different ways. It doesn't have to be 5am starts, cold plunges, or productivity apps. Success can also be working on a handful of things that reliably make a good habit hold.
It's common for us to start making life-changing alterations in January and stop by February. That isn't a reflection of poor discipline, but rather a system that was set up to run on willpower. Discipline is not a characteristic to lean on, as it often wanes when we're tired, stressed or hungry. Instead, develop robust systems that make it hard not to keep up your habits. Systems beat discipline, every time.
"Snippet", don't "skip it"
It's better to do something small, which moves the needle a teeny tiny bit towards your goal, than to do nothing at all. If your intention is to go to the gym twice a week but you feel very unmotivated, walk on the treadmill for five minutes instead of doing a full workout. If you want to read every day but don't have the headspace for a full chapter, read one page. Doing a snippet of your goal sounds silly, but it helps for a number of reasons:
- It reinforces the idea that making positive change isn't an "all or nothing" function
- It continues your momentum and ensures your overarching targets are still met
- A lot of the time, once you get started on the task, you feel like doing the full thing anyway!
Bolt it to something you already do
You already have many automatic habits: putting the kettle on, making breakfast or brushing your teeth. If you stack the new habit onto an existing one, the friction is reduced and you're more likely to adopt your new action.
Put the vitamins next to the kettle and the floss next to the toothbrush, and tell yourself:
"After I put the kettle on, I'll take my supplements."
"After I brush my teeth, I'll floss them."
The old habit becomes the reminder, and the new one follows.
Change the room, not yourself
Willpower is finite and friction limits all of us. Move the biscuits off the counter, leave the boots by the door and charge the phone in the kitchen.
Men routinely try to out-discipline an environment that's working against them, and conclude they're weak when it wins.
The two-day rule
You will miss days; it happens. One miss is fine but two in a row is when habits can start to be impacted. One miss is an interruption; two is the beginning of a new pattern.
So, remember to tell yourself: never miss twice.
One at a time
Sleep, gym, drink, phone, reading, meditation. Six changes on the first of the month are six chances to fail and one large pile of evidence your brain collates to tell you that you can't stick to anything.
Pick one and focus all of your energy on it - for a full month. Once it stops requiring thought, add the next. It feels slow but it'll still stand a year later.
Pick the keystone one
Some habits carry others with them. For most men that's sleep or walking — get either right and eating, temper, drinking and motivation all begin to improve in the background, without being worked on directly.
If you're unsure where to start, start there rather than with whatever feels most virtuous.
Drop the streak app
Tracking helps some people and turns the whole thing into an exam for others. If you've ever felt genuinely rotten about breaking a 40-day chain on an app, that app is now working against you. A mark on a paper calendar does everything useful a tracker does, with none of the associated guilt.
The part that's hard to do alone.
Not knowing what to do — doing it in week three, when the novelty has gone and nobody's watching. That's most of what a coach is for.