Developing a new habit isn’t easy, and we make it harder on ourselves when we expect too much, too fast. For example, I started a meditation challenge a week or so ago. The goal was to meditate every day. I use an app called Insight Timer to help me. I chose a course to follow along with, which was a 40 day challenge, and most of the daily meditations were around 30 minutes. This seemed reasonable, but to go from zero consistent daily minutes, to 30 consistent daily minutes ended up being a big ask. After day 4 I was finding excuses, and skipped something like 3 days in a row. When I revisited the app yesterday morning, I chose a new course to follow along with: seven-minute morning meditations for eight days. I’m only two days in, but already this course feels so much more doable.
Habit snacks are exactly as they sound. When trying to implement something new into your routine, starting small is going to have a greater chance of long-term success. Meditating every day for 5 minutes, is going to be more effective than meditating for an hour once in a blue moon. Something I learned from Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, is setting upper and lower limits for tasks. He was able to develop a 10-year journaling streak by telling himself he had to write at least one sentence a day, but couldn’t write more than five. When I first heard this I thought the upper limit was stupid- why stop yourself if you’re feeling it? But now, after noticing the pattern in myself (get excited about a new thing, make a plan to do the thing every day, burn out before the week is up) I see the appeal. So I’m going to defer back to Greg and start making the lower limit so easy it would be silly not to do it, and keep the upper limit in check to develop something sustainable.
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