- research the topic a bit why this habit would beneficial
- make a plan to meditate for 10 min every day
- set up a daily reminder on my phone
- first day: do a 10 min session
- second day: do a 10 min session
- third day: something happens and I skip the session
- fourth day: I skip the session
- fifth day: I skip the session etc. (and ignore the daily reminder on my phone)
- a few weeks later: I am suddenly reminded of the habit I tried to form
Any ideas how I can prevent losing track of the new habit after skipping once or twice? Or how I could regain my focus faster than after a few weeks?
Another element of this is that you need to establish when the habit will happen, and where. If you pick the same place every day, with time it becomes automatic.
Also important here is the aggregation of marginal gains - each little thing you improve in your life adds up over time to make a big difference. See this article from James Clear about this concept: https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains.
Remember as well - as Atomic Habits mentions - the goal isn't just to do whatever your goal is; the goal isn't just the outcome; the goal is to change your very identity. A person who wants to read every day, the goal isn't just the reading itself, it is to BECOME a reader. For the person who wants to eat well and exercise, the goal isn't just to lose weight; it is to BECOME a fit, healthy person. As you form new habits every day, what you do on a daily basis becomes part of you, and those actions you take are the evidence of your new identity.
I recommend the book to everyone who is interested in forming new habits or getting rid of old "bad" habits
focus less on reminders/tools/gadgets and more on honestly articulating to yourself - do you even want it, and why do you want it? do you really, really want to meditate? or do you feel like you "should" meditate because its the new health trend? self-coercion will not work in the long run. i felt like i should meditate for a long time, and i never did because i never really knew anything about it besides knowing i "should" do it and surface level junk from reading books. i practice mindfulness more often now because i stumbled into it at a period when i really, really needed it, and now it genuinely feels good.
one of the fittest guys i know is that way because he was a fat kid and classmates made fun of him and he hated it. he didn't set out to build a "habit" of exercising. he did not spend a little bit of time "researching the topic and its benefits". no, he went to the gym on and off for a while. after a year, he was addicted to how good it felt and spent literally hours daily watching videos on form and obsessing over eating the right thing etc.
that is what intrinsic motivation looks like. if you were really motivated to meditate, you would not just skip a few sessions and forget about it in a week - that just means you weren't really motivated to meditate anyways (which is ok by the way! you don't need to adopt every good habit some blogger/media posts about). just saying there is a big difference between "wanting to want" something and actually wanting it.
Are you keeping a log of the perceived effect of meditation on your mind and body?
Just at a glance I wouldn't guess that it's helping you enough to be interesting, based on the outcome where you detach so easily from the practice.
If you need to stick with it in the long term regardless, I would at least combine it with scheduled social pressure, like a zoom meditation group with some friends, or more detailed tracking pressure, like building a composite graph of at least five specific measured factors that are important to you. In the strictest case, some of these factors might only be measurable weekly, for example your weekly weight loss if it's a weight loss meditation, or weekly average resting heart rate, etc.
Good luck, I know it's a practice that a lot of people swear by. I learned a few different types as part of various experiences, and personally ended up developing my own method that works best for me. Everybody's different.
So, worst that can happen is I miss a week and I'm then reminded of why I wanted to do this and I can get started for next week.
The most important thing is to be kind to yourself, run or walk at your own pace, falling a couple of times doesn't mean you have to give up, eventually you will get there, even if you skip a couple of days or weeks or give up for a short time and take over later on. It's self improvement, nobody is supposed to be perfect.
The most important insight for me was: It is not possible to train a new habit out of thin air. You always have to change an existing (bad) habit.
Simply put, a habit works in three steps: (1) A cue gets triggered; (2) a routine gets performed and (3) in the end, we are getting a reward.
Let's take the (bad) habit of reaching for our cell phone in the morning after waking up. The cue here is that we have just spent 8 hours outside of any information flow and now feel we need to catch up. So then we start the routine and reach for our cell phone. And the supposed reward now is that we think that we are better informed afterward. But that's mostly not the case because, after hours of doom scrolling every day, we instead feel like wasting our time.
The idea now is that we keep the cue, switch out the routine, and experiment a bit with the reward. So in your meditation example, instead of reaching for the cell phone, we could start a 10-minute meditation while still lying in bed. Now the reward could come from recognizing that the behavior makes us feel better. Since we already internalized the cue, we can't forget the new habit.
(What I have described here is, of course, very abstract and must be seen individually and requires continuous training.)
What could also help would be to simplify the routine. You wrote that you want to meditate for 10 minutes every day. As a start, it may make more sense to set a goal to "meditate regularly." I once set myself the goal to read for at least 30 minutes every day. But as life is, there is not always the possibility to take 30 minutes at a time. And then I started to skip the new habit. I have changed that I also try to read in short free moments and not in a fixed setting. For example, if I brush my teeth for 3 minutes, I can read 1/2 page in the meantime.
[1] https://medium.com/@aidanhornsby/notes-on-the-power-of-habit...
Then, any other habit becomes easier to incorporate once you talk about it every time you journal. My favorite journaling method is the Theme System by Cortex (Myke and CGP).
What helped me, after learning the basics of breath meditation (and reading Wherever You Go) was committing to "trigger-based" meditation.
I decided that whenever I was...
* annoyed by something, anything. experiencing annoyance.
* waiting for something.
* in a work meeting I didn't need to actively participate in.
... I would, internally, begin a breath meditation, and hold it for as long as I remembered to.
This technique by itself has been life-changing for me, and I can't recommend it enough.
It helped me train my attention-focus, and gradually but quickly improved my experience.
I have this problem when I try and form lots of habits at once. It's easy to remind yourself to meditate daily if it's the only habit you are trying to form.
Once you have two or three of these, you're moving into checklist territory... And then it's easy to have them slip.
My recommendation: pick one habit to form and work on it for several weeks. Once you notice it's actually habitual, then start working on a second one.
A few others have mentioned "Atomic Habits". It's a good book to review as well.
This post does bring a bit of comedy into reality...
Jeff Goldblum in Annie Hall (1977) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nYElwd1mNM
- https://woopmylife.org/
- mental simulations https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Ewa+Jarczewska-Gerc+mental+simulat...
The harder part is trying to keep my family from taking up that time but that’s a separate problem ;)