Exist

How to know when to give up on a new habit

I’ve been working hard on building new habits for a while now. Whether it’s exercise, getting up early, or learning a new skill, I generally follow the same kind of process.

But there’s one point in the process where I often trip myself up: deciding when to quit.

Because I only ever work on building one new habit at a time (the short version of why: it’s a lot easier when my attention is focused on just one new behaviour), I need to either give up on that habit or decide it’s solid before I can move on to building a new one.

Usually I decide I’ve got a habit figured out, then move on to building a new one. Getting up early, for instance: I spent months struggling to get up before 8a.m. Once I finally managed to do it easily for a few weeks in a row, I turned my focus to another habit, while maintaining my early waking routine every day.

But sometimes I quit before the habit has really solidified into a regular behaviour. Most recently, I quit a habit I’d built of doing 5 push-ups every morning. I got to a streak of 67 days in a row before I decided to pull the pin.

At 67 days, I was just about ready to start increasing the number of push-ups and focusing more on the behaviour itself, rather than just making sure I did it every day. I barely had to work at remembering to do my push-ups, since they became part of my routine.

But I didn’t feel like I was getting much out of my regular push-ups. The fifth one was always hard. On day one, on day 30, and on day 67 it was hard to finish the set of five. I didn’t expect to get strong from doing five push-ups every day, but I did expect doing five to become easy. I’d planning to increase to ten, then 15, and keep going until I actually was increasing my strength and building muscle from that daily habit.

Apart from not feeling any improvement in my strength, I didn’t feel like I was getting much out of the daily push-up habit.

I get up early because getting out of bed any time after 8am seems to always start my day off on the wrong foot. I’m more productive, and just happier on days I get up early.

I practise French every morning for a minimum of 5 minutes because I enjoy it. I like learning foreign languages. And I’ve noticed that the more regularly I practise, the better I remember and understand the French I’m learning.

Those habits make me feel good, so they’re worth building and maintaining.

I thought doing push-ups every day would make me feel good, but I never got much from it. It was better for me in theory than it was in practice.

I recently started a weekly gymnastics class. It’s two hours of sweating, muscle burning, fear-facing fun. And it’s making me a lot stronger than five push-ups ever did.

Jumping into hours of gymnastics training every week is the opposite of a daily push-ups habit: it’s extreme, and it’s a huge commitment to go from zero to 2+ hours of training per week. But it’s also the opposite in terms of the fun I get out of it. I loved every minute of my first gymnastics class, even when I thought my arms would give out under me, or when I was tearing the skin off my hands while swinging on the high bar.

Push-ups were always a necessary part of my morning routine, not a fun part.

I still recommend small, daily habits to build up towards big goals over time. For instance, I’m stretching, improving my core strength, and practising handstand technique every day. I spend less than half an hour on these activities daily, but over time they’ll improve my strength and technique in gymnastics class. If I didn’t practise at all between classes, it would take me a lot longer to progress.

But with each daily habit I work on, I try to find a reward in it somehow. Whether it’s fun to do, makes my day noticeably better, or I’m just motivated by the improvement I see in myself every day, these rewards make a habit worth sticking with.