Mastering Consistency: 6 Powerful Habits for Lasting Change

Have you ever started something with full motivation, telling yourself that this time will be different? You make a plan, set goals, and maybe even tell others about it. For the first few days, you're crushing it. Then, life happens - one stressful day, one missed session, one excuse - and suddenly you're back where you started. Another habit dead in the water.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. Many of us have been through this cycle countless times, struggling with workouts, diets, money management, productivity, and even the simplest habits. But here's the truth: the reason we struggle to stay consistent isn't because of laziness, lack of willpower, or discipline. It's because the system we're using is broken.

In this article, we'll explore why you keep failing to stay consistent and how to finally fix it. We'll delve into six powerful habits and simple hacks that can help you become more consistent in life, making it easier than ever to achieve your goals.

Understanding the Root of Inconsistency

Before we dive into the solutions, it's crucial to understand why inconsistency is such a common problem. Contrary to popular belief, inconsistency isn't a personality flaw. It's actually a programmed response that your brain has learned over time.

From the moment you're born, your brain starts absorbing information like a sponge. It records everything - how your parents reacted to stress, how adults handled failure, what your environment taught you about success, discipline, and effort. This programming happens mostly before you turn 10 years old, shaping your subconscious mind in ways you might not even realize.

So when you try to be consistent with a new habit, your subconscious mind pulls you back to what feels familiar. It doesn't matter if that familiar pattern is harmful; your brain clings to it because that's what it knows. This is why, no matter how much motivation you start with, you keep falling back into old patterns.

Moreover, when your brain stores information, it's not just storing thoughts - it's storing emotions. And emotions are far more powerful than logic. You can tell yourself all day long that consistency is good for you, but if your body and mind are programmed to associate consistency with stress, failure, or exhaustion, you're going to resist it.

This is why you can know exactly what you need to do but still struggle to do it. You plan to wake up early, but when the alarm rings, your body remembers how good it feels to sleep in. You decide to eat healthily, but when stressed, your brain craves the comfort of junk food. You promise yourself you'll study or work on your side hustle, but your subconscious mind pulls you towards distractions because they feel easier.

Unless you learn how to break free from this old cycle, consistency will always feel like a battle you can't win. But don't worry - there's hope. Let's explore six habits and simple hacks that can help you become more consistent in life.

Habit 1: Create an Identity Shift

The first and most crucial step in your journey towards consistency is creating an identity shift. This is the foundation upon which all other habits will be built. Instead of focusing on what you need to do, start focusing on who you need to become.

Consistency is less about action and more about identity. Your habits are not just actions; they're an extension of who you believe you are. This is why people who believe they are fit are always working out, and why people who believe they take care of their body are naturally healthy eaters.

Until you change your internal identity, no amount of willpower or discipline will make you consistent. Every day, you wake up and unconsciously repeat the same behaviors as the day before. You might think you want to change, but deep down, your brain is addicted to who you've always been.

So how do you rewire your identity? Here are some strategies:

1. Change your narrative: Instead of saying you're trying to go to the gym, tell yourself you're the kind of person who never skips a workout. Instead of trying to be healthy, you're the kind of person who fuels their body properly. Instead of trying to stay productive, you're the kind of person who always follows through on their word.

2. Create affirmations: Write down these new identity statements and stick them on your mirror. Read them out loud every day. This helps reprogram your subconscious mind.

3. Observe your urges: When you feel the urge to quit a habit, pause and observe why. Is it because you're overwhelmed, tired, or bored? Once you understand the reason, remind yourself that this is your old programming running - it's not your current version, not your reality, not the person you want to become.

4. Embrace discomfort: Remember, discomfort is not a threat. It's just a sign that you're running on old programming. If you sit with it long enough, you can interrupt that cycle.

5. Find your quitting point: Look at your past attempts at building consistency. When do you tend to quit most often? Is it a day after you start? A week? Once you find this pattern, create a bare minimum rule for that time. For example, if you usually quit after a week, set a 5-minute "show up" rule for day 8 and beyond. Just do the habit for 5 minutes - that's all. This helps you push past your breaking point without falling off the wagon completely.

Remember, your mind and body will resist at first. It will feel uncomfortable. But the more you override your old programming, the weaker it becomes.

Habit 2: Make Your Habits Non-Negotiable

The second powerful habit for maintaining consistency is to stop negotiating with yourself. Make the habit you're trying to build a non-negotiable part of your routine.

Every time you give yourself an option to do something, you're giving yourself room for failure. When you wake up and debate whether you should go to the gym or not, the battle is already lost. Your brain will find excuses: "I'm too tired," "I didn't get enough sleep," "I'll go later," "Today is not a good day."

Consistency becomes much easier when you remove the negotiation process entirely. Think about the things in your life that are automatic - brushing your teeth, taking a shower, bathing. You do these things every day regardless of whether you want to or not. You don't wake up and wonder, "Should I brush my teeth today?" You just do it.

To be consistent in anything in life, you need to treat each of your chosen habits like this - as if they're automatic. Here's how:

1. Set concrete plans: Instead of saying "I will work out three times a week," set specific days and times. For example, "I will work out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7 am, right after waking up."

2. Prepare in advance: Set yourself up for success by preparing beforehand. Lay out your workout clothes the night before, meal prep for the week, book your classes in advance. Do whatever you need to do to make the habit as concrete as possible, leaving no wiggle room for excuses.

3. Treat habits like medicine: Think of your habits like antibiotics prescribed by a doctor. You take them exactly as instructed, not skipping a day because you're tired or not in the mood. Why? Because if you do, the medicine stops working, you develop antibiotic resistance, and your infection stays or gets worse.

Habits work the same way. Every time you skip a session, you weaken the pattern your brain is trying to build. Miss enough days, and your brain forgets the habit completely, forcing you to start from scratch.

This analogy of treating your commitments like taking medicine can be incredibly powerful. It makes your habits non-optional, non-flexible, and not mood-based. You don't have to continue with this analogy forever - just until you push past your resistance. After that, it becomes automatic, a part of your life you no longer have to think about.

Habit 3: Protect Your Mental Energy

The third crucial habit for maintaining consistency is becoming extremely protective of your mental energy. Decision fatigue is one of the biggest killers of habits.

You wake up each day with a limited amount of mental energy. Every decision you make during the day - what to wear, what to eat, when to work out - drains that energy little by little. By the time you get to the habits you're trying to build, your brain is already exhausted. That's why it's so easy to scroll on Instagram for hours but so hard to get yourself to write, study, or work out.

To protect your energy and boost your consistency, try these strategies:

1. Do important tasks first: Whatever habit you're trying to build, do it right after you wake up. If you're trying to build a workout habit, exercise in the morning. If you're trying to write more, do it first thing. If you're aiming to study with more focus, hit the books right after breakfast. This way, your mental energy reserves are full and being used for the thing you want to do most.

2. Eliminate unnecessary decisions: Sit down with a pen and paper and make a list of all the things you have to do throughout the day. Then ask yourself: How many of these can you automate? How many can you delegate? How many can you batch?

   • For example, you could decide all your outfits for the week in one hour on Sunday.
   • You could create a meal plan and prep your meals for the week on Sunday as well.
   • You could schedule your workouts like you schedule your meetings - set the time and location in advance.

When you automate these decisions, you leave a lot more energy for the things that actually matter. This strategy is incredibly powerful. Since I started meal prepping and pre-deciding my workouts for the month, it's become so much easier to just get up and do the thing without having to think about it.

Habit 4: Make Your Tasks Smaller

The fourth habit that can dramatically improve your consistency is to make your tasks smaller. This trick actually saved my fitness routine, and it can work wonders for any habit you're trying to build.

One of the biggest reasons people fail at consistency is because they usually focus on the end goal, which often seems like a monumental task too far in the future to care about now. Our brains are programmed to associate effort with pain and resistance, so we tend to gravitate towards what's pleasurable right now rather than focusing on what could be pleasurable in the future.

But you can circumvent this by breaking your goal into smaller routines. Here's how I applied this to my workout routine:

I wear a fitness tracker that allows me to set daily goals for calorie burn, workout time, and standing hours. Initially, I set my calorie burn goal to 600 active calories per day and my workout goal to 60 minutes. While that might not seem like a lot, on busy days it was a struggle to even take out an hour for a workout. When you factor in travel time to the gym and shower time afterwards, a one-hour workout actually takes up about 2.5 hours of your day.

When I couldn't achieve my workout or calorie goals, it became very demotivating. Eventually, it was so discouraging that I stopped working out altogether and turned off the calorie tracking feature.

But then I learned about setting smaller goals. I edited my inputs to reduce my calorie burn goal to 300 and my workout time to 30 minutes. Suddenly, it became so much more manageable. It felt stupidly easy. And here's the interesting part - once I started doing it, I could easily do an hour of workout because there was no mental resistance. When I started working out, I easily burned over 300 calories anyway.

This principle works for everything:

• If you struggle to work out, commit to doing it for just 5 minutes.
• If you want to write more, start by writing one paragraph.
• If you want to drink more water, take half a glass before every meal.

By lowering the bar for what you have to do right now, you remove resistance completely. There's a sweet spot where your body and mind stop resisting - it could be one minute of working out, or five minutes of writing. That's okay. It's still better than not doing it at all.

Once you put that small habit in place and start showing up consistently, you'll find that you're automatically able to scale up without even trying. Once I set my workout bar down to 30 minutes and 300 calories, I was automatically working out for 45-60 minutes every day and naturally burning more calories without having to put mental effort into it.

Habit 5: Remember That Success is Borrowed, Not Owned

The fifth habit is a crucial mindset shift: remembering that success is borrowed, not owned. You have to keep paying rent.

When we start trying to become consistent in something, we often do it because we have an end goal to achieve. We work out because we want to lose weight. We stay productive because we want to pass an exam or get a promotion at work. And we think that once we achieve that goal, we can stop and relax.

But here's the catch: success is not permanent. It's a result of consistent actions. If you stop taking those actions, your success in that field fades. It's like rent - you don't just pay for one month and get to live there forever. You have to keep paying rent.

If you stop working out, your progress fades. If you've lost weight through consistent exercise and a calorie deficit, but then give up on these habits and return to your old ways, you're likely to gain the weight back. This holds true for everything in life:

• If you stop creating content, your audience will forget about you.
• If you stop working on your writing, a year down the line you might forget the basics.
• If you stop practicing a language you've learned, you'll gradually lose fluency.

Think about the fittest people you know. They work out regardless of their current fitness level or weight. The most successful entrepreneurs still put in the work; they don't stop once they hit an arbitrary goal.

Success is not something you own - it's something you maintain. This is why you need to see consistency as a lifestyle, not a temporary push. This is why shifting your identity and seeing yourself as a consistent person is so important. This is why it's crucial to keep showing up daily, even if it's just for five minutes.

When you stop, you don't just pick up from where you left off - you often have to start from the beginning, which is so much harder to do.

Habit 6: Hack Your Dopamine to Make Consistency Fun

The sixth and final habit is all about making consistency enjoyable. This is the key to ensuring you don't quit or burn out.

If you continue to obsess over your results, you're eventually going to either burn out or quit once you get those results. For example, if your only goal is to lose 10 kg, you'll try to get there as quickly as possible and then likely fall off the wagon once you're done. Or you might quit when it stops feeling exciting.

Instead, you need to find ways to make the process so much fun that you stop worrying about the end result completely. Yes, your consistency might start out with a bigger goal in mind, but your aim should be to find something that makes the process itself enjoyable.

Here are some ways to hack your dopamine and make consistency more fun:

1. Find enjoyable workouts: Instead of just obsessing over the goal of losing weight, find workouts that you actually enjoy. Join groups or classes where you meet people with similar energies.

2. Combine habits with entertainment: Watch your favorite show while walking on a treadmill. Listen to interesting podcasts while doing your daily run.

3. Make studying fun: If you struggle to sit down and study, join a study group or make your notes aesthetic. Add that fun element to the process of studying so you're excited to get up and do it.

4. Gamify your habits: Use apps that turn your habits into games. Many fitness apps, for example, have achievement systems that can make working out feel like leveling up in a video game.

5. Reward yourself: Set up a reward system for your consistency. Maybe after a week of sticking to your habit, you treat yourself to something you enjoy.

6. Track your progress visually: Use a habit tracker or a bullet journal to visually represent your consistency. Seeing a chain of successful days can be very motivating.

7. Make it social: Share your journey with friends or on social media. The support and accountability can make the process more enjoyable.

By adding these elements of fun, progress becomes automatic without you facing a lot of mental resistance. You're giving your brain the right incentive to stick with the habit.

Putting It All Into Action

Now that you know how to be consistent realistically, it's time to put all of these learnings into action. Here's your homework:

1. Pick one habit that you want to be consistent in.
2. Shrink it down to make it effortless. If working out is your habit, make your bare minimum exercise just 5 minutes of working out every day. If you show up for that, you've shown up for your workout. When you have the energy and time, do more; when you don't, just do the minimum.
3. Write an affirmation that aligns your identity with that habit.
4. Find a way to make that habit fun. Do some research on Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, or wherever you like to find inspiration.
5. Commit to undertaking that habit for 7 days without any negotiations.

Remember, the key to consistency is not discipline. It's setting up your life so that showing up is the easiest option. Often, it just requires this one mental switch.

Consistency doesn't have to be a constant struggle. By understanding the psychology behind our habits, creating the right systems, and making the process enjoyable, we can build lasting change in our lives. It's not about perfection - it's about progress. Every small step you take towards consistency is a victory. Celebrate these victories, learn from your setbacks, and keep moving forward. With these six powerful habits, you're well on your way to mastering consistency and achieving your goals.

Article created from: https://youtu.be/M7Sg-VdG4LU?si=R60SrBo5E1UfSQtg