What To Do When You’ve Let A Good Habit Slip (And How To Get Back On Track!)
Having great habits such as eating well, exercising regularly or following a good morning skincare routine are really important aspects to being able to live a full healthy life and making us feel confident about ourselves.
They also go a long way to helping you accomplish your personal goals.
But sometimes (no matter how well things are planned!) life just gets in the way and those good habits start to slide when you get knocked off your routines.
Whether you’ve had a sick family member or work has been more busy than usual, it’s easy enough to find that the little but consistent things you were regularly doing to support yourself have disappeared.
Rather than making yourself wrong or beating yourself up, the most important thing first is to realise that normal life stuff happens to everyone and it’s one of those things that you may just have to work a little harder at to get going again in your life.
If there is a habit you really want to get back into but feel like it’s all a bit hard at the moment, here are some quick tips I’ve found useful in my own life which you may also find helpful:
✔️ Start somewhere small and with the easiest way to re-implement the habit.
If it’s an exercise routine that’s slipped, start by just packing your gym bag or making sure your clothes and walking shoes are ready in advance so that you feel more compelled to put them on and leave the house.
⏰ Set a phone reminder to do your routine.
This works really well if you’re someone who forgets things easily and you have a morning or evening routine you like to complete. This way you don’t need to rely on your brain to remember everything and let tech do some of the heavy lifting for you until your habit gets re-established.
⚡️ Create a circuit breaker especially if you’ve replaced a good habit with a bad one.
If something like mindless snacking has crept into your daily routine and you don’t want it there, be aware of what other habits are involved when you start to do this. If it’s always done when you sit down to watch TV at night, read a book instead for a couple of weeks until the bad habit is broken.
🗣️ Work on shifting your language to something more empowering.
One I love to use is the “I’m the kind of person who….” phrase, which is a good one to journal with.
Some examples of this are:
“I’m the kind of person who feels great after I’ve exercised.”
“I’m the kind of person who takes extra good care of myself even when life is busy.”
“I’m the kind of person who gets up early to watch every sunrise.”
“I’m the kind of person who likes eating healthy food options as my first choice.”
💪🏻 Lastly, (and my favourite!) pretend like you never fell off the bandwagon in the first place and imagine that you just kept going!
In a few days you’ll feel like you never stopped at all and you probably won’t notice the time you spent away from whatever behaviour you were doing because you’ll feel so good as a result of re-implementing your healthy habit again.
The most important thing is once you become self-aware and notice that it’s been a while since you were last implementing that habit or behaviour, make sure you take steps to get back to doing it!
Valli x
