The Top 5 Reasons People Don't Maintain Positive Habits And What To Do About It.
Whether or not they are conscious or even positive, we all have habits. The thing about habits is that they are our automatic behaviours that we do without thinking. That is what a habit is.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a habit as: something that you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing that you are doing it:
Habits free us from having to think which for a bad habit is dangerous and for a positive habit is beneficial.
The motivation for changing a habit from negative to positive is because something is at stake.
It could be your:
Job
Finances
Health
Relationships and love
Quality of life
Positive habits are the ones we want to foster given that once the behaviour becomes a habit, maintaining it is easy and being positive in nature, the habit itself will enhance our well-being and quality of life.
Do you answer yes to the following?
Adopting more positive habits into your life is one of your goals
Now is the right time for you to be working on this, and
You are falling victim to one of the top 5 reasons humans find it difficult to maintain positive habits,
The thing I want you to take away from this training is that you are not alone. You are not the only one, and how you feel is most likely how most of us feel as we try and fail.
The thing I want to emphasise is that there is a time and a place for working on transforming habits and that this work is not about making you feel bad, if now is not the right time.
If you have just had a baby for example, or you are sick, or you have a terminal illness, or someone has just died or you are going through a relationship breakup or you are dealing with aging parents, or moving house, it may not be a good time to embark on the transform- my- habits- journey. You want to set yourself up for success and forming new habits is hard enough as it is, without added pressure.
But on the other hand often when we are facing adversity it can be the positive habits that we have formed and trained ourselves in, that gets us through difficult times.
Let’s look at some common experiences that a lot of us feel on a regular basis, that becomes a motivator for change:
Is there any area of your life where you feel:
Fat
Poor
Unfit
Out of control
Unhealthy
Stressed
Like a failure
Like a victim
Unsupported
Ashamed
Undisciplined
Lonely
Toxic (towards yourself or others)
Unstable
To get out of these negative experiences developing habits are often the way forward.
Some positive common habits:
Exercise
Being organised and productive
Eating healthy
Getting up early
Self-care routines such as meditation, journaling, yoga, Qu-gong
Regular saving
Spending time with friends and family/staying in touch with friends and family
Proper Rest
Moderate drinking
No smoking
Being kind
Working on mind-set and money beliefs
Self-love
Taking supplements
Reasons That Make Us Fail
Too busy at work
Work appears to be a very valid reason to fail at adopting one of the positive habits from the above list, such as exercise, for example.
Work in our culture is one of the highest values
We feel that if we are not working hard that makes us a bad person almost, and that we don’t deserve to put well-being above work.
Money is higher on the value system then health for a lot of people in our culture
Often the first thing that gets impacted is our time away from activities which form part of positive habits.
My cousin runs a child-care centre and is over-worked and literally flat out. Obviously being in charge and having such a huge responsibility to run the centre, work is really important to her. She had habitually put work above exercise and at age 53 had a heart attack and had to take a few months off work to recover. She was forced to rest and recover. And one of the things her doctor said to her was that she had to exercise from now on.
Too tired
This reason will always make us fail at adopting a new positive habit, as feeling tired is really debilitating.
The thing to look at is what made us tired in the first place. Was it one of our less positive habits?
Was it because we watched too much TV and went to bed late
Were we eating junk food and drinking too much
Too much partying or too much excess in general such as over-eating, over drinking, under sleeping, lack of planning.
Sometimes we need to get a blood test and we put it off, or we need to take supplements and don’t get around to it, or we buy them but forget to take them
It is common for people to know that they are anaemic for example and not do anything about it.
The not doing anything about it, becomes a bad habit in and of itself
Too disorganised and lack of planning
Not having foresight and making time in the present to take care of something in the future
Not setting aside enough time to complete tasks
Not having a list
It often makes us under prepared which in and of itself is undermining our true potential and leads to feeling disappointed because we are never able to give something our best shot.
Being disorganised means that out judgement is off
Lack of discipline and prioritisation
Tendency to waste time perhaps
A lack of intentionality and therefore a lack of scheduling and sticking to a schedule
Without scheduling you never know where you stand, everything is vague and can easily get out of control
This is no fun. The hours and days slip through our fingers and there are no results to show for it.
Too lazy
For those of us who suffer from laziness this is really hard to overcome, but not impossible
Believing you are lazy in and of itself is being self-critical
Perhaps you really love leverage and efficiency and can’t see the point of doing something a certain way, if there is a better way. And what is wrong with that.
This does work for certain things, but not for personal habits which only you can do.
If you believe laziness is getting in the way, I would suggest that perhaps there is more to it, such as you don’t believe you are worthy of having success, or health, or love in your life, or whatever the habit is, that you feel you are being lazy in. So you need to make a deeper enquiry into your mind and tendencies to get to the bottom of this.
Procrastination can also be disguised as laziness and again my take is that this is somehow a self-worth issue.
Stay kind and open-minded and engage positive self-talk.
Giving up
Not seeing results fast enough and losing interest and not getting anything out of the activity initially, can all lead to giving up too soon.
This can also be associated with a lack of determination and with being impatient
Once I joined a networking group which was a weekly breakfast and quite early on I wanted to quit going because I did not feel connected to the other members. A little voice inside of my head told me to give it a bit more time, which I did, and I ended up going for two years and making really good friends and a couple of my clients I met there.
The opposite of giving up is sticking with something, and in relation to habits the best approach is to specify a period of time, set in advance, to which you intend to commit.
It is helpful to reframe our thinking from short-term to longer term.
The thought of playing a long game especially at the beginning though is often hard to bear, if the activity or habit is difficult
So it really is a mind game. And comes back to a commitment. And we can easily go around and around in circles.
The first step to outsmarting and overcoming all of these reasons is shedding light on the ones which we are prone to.
The second step is being honest with ourselves.
The third step is asking ourselves, do I really want to change this?
How committed am I?
If the answer is not really committed, I like the idea of it, but I am not really committed, congratulations, I honour your honesty. And there is nothing wrong with that. That is your reality FOR NOW.
You are not committed yet.
So keep making an enquiry, how come? Why is this the case?
But if the answer is yes
The way to overcome and outsmart the tendency that stops you from doing the positive thing that you want to maintain as a habit, is to keep trying. Keep re-committing. When you fail start again.
Saying: ‘This is simple, this is easy, this is fun’, repeatedly, and of course while doing the activity especially if it is hard. Reframe the activity and use self-talk as a useful tool.
At the start of the week outline what you are committed to this week? What is realistic, and set yourself up for success. Plan as much as possible and schedule this in your calendar.
Keep a habits spread-sheet/journal. And track your progress.
That is all well and good if you know what you are doing around the habit, but there are some cases where you might want to change your habit but in reality, really have no clue about how to go about it.
For example, you want to eat more healthy, but you have no idea what this looks like.
Or you could have a goal around creating content for your social media but you don’t really know what type of content or how to go about this, you need some education in this area.
Another example could be that you know you are poor at communication or your communication is toxic and you wish to change your habits, but don’t know how to do this. For this specific example, the first thing might be to learn more about communication in relationships. This might involve reading some books, or going to see a therapist and learning some new tools to practise and adopt on a daily basis, which will help you to start tracking your progress.
In general, for all of these examples, before you can even start, you need to do some research and figure out what are some options.
You need a strategy around the goal to adopt the habit.
I am here, and I want to get over there. And you have to first figure out the route which will lead you to create some concrete action steps.
As a summary, the top five reasons (of being too busy at work, too tired, too disorganised and lack of planning, too lazy and giving up), which make if difficult for people to maintain positive habits, are certainly real and a threat to changing for the better.
Embracing new habits takes intention and work and the more you are honest with yourself the easier it is going to be.
I will be launching a new program around forming new habits, and if you are interested leave a comment below and I will personal message you the details).