your habit stack isn’t broken. it’s just been interrupted.
A habit stack that falls apart doesn’t mean it was built badly.
Habit stacks fall apart because something changed, or something ordinary happened: a missed day, a disrupted routine, illness, a holiday. The list is virtually endless, and none of it is evidence about you or the method.
the all-or-nothing trap.
For years, if I didn’t run on a Monday, that was the week gone. I’d wait until the following Monday to start again. It was arbitrary, but I used it like a rule I couldn’t break. Miss a Monday, lose a week. Sometimes lose a month. I knew exactly what was happening and still couldn’t break the pattern because I’d decided what a missed day meant. And it wasn’t helpful. In fact, it was the one factor that was keeping me from running.
The fix wasn’t more willpower. It was removing the trigger that made one bad day define the rest of my week. Getting to the root cause is often the simplest solution. At one point I started taking my kit to work and running home instead, this removed Monday from the equation. My run now relied on being in the office, not on which day it was. It worked because everything didn’t rely on what I did on a Monday.
perfectionism isn’t commitment.
Underneath most inconsistent habits is a demand for perfection that nobody could possibly meet. If a plan isn’t followed exactly, the instinct is to abandon the plan entirely, which, when you say it out loud, is an extreme response. But it is also every bit as common.
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I see this pattern in clients too. One wanted to build a website for their business. They knew what they wanted to say, the pages they wanted to build, but nothing was happening. They wanted it to be perfect, but you can’t create perfection out of nothing. And, in this case, perfect is subjective. The first step was to start writing. Every morning after they washed their breakfast dishes, their laptop was ready on the table, they wrote a sentence. Just one. Whatever came to mind. After a week they had five sentences. That’s five more than they had written in months.
when routines change.
Even a habit that’s working depends on the conditions around it staying roughly the same, and they rarely do. A change in location, a shift in routine, an environment that no longer has the same props in the same place, none of this means the habit or the person has failed. It means something around the habit changed, and the habit needs to be reattached somewhere new rather than abandoned.
one missed day isn’t a broken habit.
All-or-nothing thinking is useful for getting something started. It’s a poor system for keeping it going, because eventually something will disrupt it, and if the rule is ‘one disruption ends it,’ it will end. The fix is deciding in advance, before a day is missed, what a missed day means. If the answer is ‘nothing, try again tomorrow,’ decided ahead of time, there’s nothing left to negotiate with yourself about when the day comes.
A strong habit isn’t one that never gets interrupted. It’s one that’s easy to restart.
If your habit stack’s fallen apart and you’re not sure whether to rebuild it or start again completely, book a free introductory call and we’ll work out which one it needs.
I’m Fiona, a habit coach and the founder of The Habit Hacker. I work with people who know what they want but can’t make themselves do it. Together we build habits that are unique to you and your life. My 90-day programme, Brick by Brick, is built on my philosophy that personalised habits change lives. Find out more at thehabithacker.co.uk
