The Secret to Building new Habits that Stick

Picture this. At 3 in the morning, a surge of determination rushes through your veins, as you randomly think about how great it would be to finally get your act together and work towards building a sick physique. And so you try. You decide to start hitting the gym 5 days a week. You decide sign up at a gym and make the ideal workout plan. You then tell yourself that you will start tomorrow.

A few days pass. You tell yourself that you're simply warming up, and that you will start next week instead. Next week turns into next month, and before you know it, you realize that you no longer have the motivation to actually commit.

All of us have probably faced a similar situation at some point. We decide to finally work towards our dreams in order to make them a reality. But a lack of motivation and the seeming difficulty of the task makes it impossible for you to start.

I'm here to tell you that it's actually not impossible to start new habits, however difficult they may seem. All you need is a mindset shift and a new approach. Say hello to progressive overload!

Progressive overload is an approach to building new habits, where we start off by lowering the difficulty to the point that doing the task becomes easy. For example, going back to the workout example, if committing to 5 days of working out per week seems too hard, simply start with working out for 2 minutes per day instead.

There's no doubt that your mind will scoff at this idea: "There's no way 2 minutes of exercise is going to be of any use!" But understand that the intensity or difficulty at which you do a habit is not even close to being as important as doing the habit consistently. Consistency is king, and we must start off by going at a super comfortable pace. And after all, even 2 minutes of exercise a day is more than the 0 minutes/day of exercising you used to do, and progress is progress, no matter how little. In fact, even tiny amounts of progress are sources of major future progress and motivation in the long run, so celebrate every small victory.

Once you get a little more comfortable at your current pace, increase the difficulty a little. Maybe move up to 15 minutes per day, or even 30 minutes of working out every other day. Slowly begin working your way up at a pace that feels natural and that doesn't feel like a chore to you. As you slowly start working your way up, throwing away all your fears and judgement, your habit goes from requiring motivation to becoming a source of it. When I first started working out, I genuinely couldn't wait for my next workout, and my gym sessions ended up becoming the highlights of my day.

And that's all it takes to build habits that stick. Starting at a comfortable pace helps destroy the fears and worries of you having to face hours and hours of grueling agony while doing the habit, and you soon begin to learn that the habits you want to build are actually super fun in their own right. Every day starts to become a fun challenge where you try to beat the work you did the previous day, like beating your highscore in a video game. Just make sure to celebrate every small win and carry on ahead knowing that you'll have fun through the process.