Create elastic habits
Well-being 🌿 | Improve yourself 🏋️ | #Habits #Elastic #Adapt
TL;DR
Maintaining daily habits is extremely valuable, but also challenging.
Accept your human nature and that there’s a risk you might break your daily streaks.
Create a matrix of goals with different levels of challenge and choose activities based on how you feel each day. Commit to at least the basic level and enjoy the flexibility.
Seed
If you want to improve yourself on a daily basis, you can stick to daily habits. Typically, reading a book, doing exercise, and practising a new language - the 3 classics of self-improvement daily habits.
But as stated in the book “Elastic Habits” by Stephen Guise, we are all human, and we cannot expect to be able or simply willing to maintain those habits absolutely every day, tirelessly like a robot.
And this is often where we tend to break habits. We feel guilty about breaking our day streaks. Or if we achieve less than what we had in mind when we started to build this habit, it feels like cheating, like today doesn’t count. Have you heard of the Duolingo daily streak anxiety? It’s fascinating how a feature that is supposed to help you progress can end up having a negative effect on your mental health. But not everyone is affected by this.
Anyways, the idea is to first accept that you are human, and you are likely to fail to maintain your daily habits like a machine. And now that you’ve accepted this, you can build a better methodology to handle your daily development.
Instead of sticking with one unique goal, create a matrix of goals from which you will choose every day, depending on how you feel.
Since it’s a grid, you will build 3 activities that help you to get closer to your goal, and for each of these activities, define a different level of challenge for yourself.
This way, you’ll be able to adapt the activity to how you feel.
And when you build that plan, you will commit to doing at least the basic level of one of these activities, knowing that this is the minimum effort you are required to do in a day to get closer to your ultimate goal.
Also, you give yourself a choice of activity, so you can break the routine if you find it a bit dull, and again, you can adapt to how you feel.
Example
Basic (the minimum effort you need to get closer to your goal)
Gym: 5 minutes Push-ups: 5 push-ups Walking / Running: Walking 5 minutes
Medium
Gym: 20 minutes Push-ups: 25 push-ups Walking / Running: Walking 15 minutes
Epic (the maximum effort you need to get closer to your goal)
Gym: 1-hour Push-ups: 100 push-ups Walking / Running: Walking 1 hour OR Running 30 minutes
This matrix was taken from Vihan Chelliah’s YouTube video, “How to Make Your Habits Stick Forever | Elastic Habits (Visual Guide)”. Link in the Bonus section, below.
Bonus
As mentioned above, this is the video which I pulled this matrix from. I like the coloured Post-it calendar tip at the end. It’s a nice visual way to mark the progress.
And I cannot have an article about habits that doesn't mention James Clear, so here you go: