You Don’t Have to be Perfect to Create a Perfectly Good Habit

“I blew my habit,” my wife said to me last night as she pulled the covers over her head. “I didn’t go for my walk today. I knew I should have done it this morning,” she whispered in a palpably disappointed tone. “I just ruined my streak.”

As I tried to reassure her that her habit wasn’t ruined, I started wondering why we’re all so obsessed with streaks. After all, since the beginning of January, she’s taken epic morning walks (they’re more like hikes) every day around a natural lake up the road from our home. They can take up to an hour and a half and she hasn’t yet missed a day…until yesterday.

She’s been crushing her habit, so why is it that one small miss could make her feel crushed?

Her feeling didn’t surprise me. In the past, I’ve often felt the same way when I blew a streak. Using a streak to motivate yourself can be a useful tool, just so long as it doesn’t break. But if it does (and it often does), the disappointment can feel deeply visceral when you’ve been on a roll and then, suddenly, it’s over. It’s ruined. The streak is dead.

But is it?

Habit Streaks vs. Habit Plants

Yes, the streak might be dead. But the habit — the thing you?actually?care about — is still very much alive. It?wasn’t?all for nothing, contrary to how you might?feel. The nice thing about missing a day here or there is that it won’t kill the habit.

Streaks might look cool in your habit-tracking app, but habits are a bit more like plants. If you don’t water a house plant for a day, it’s not going to die. Don’t water it for a week? Different story. Habits are similar. A missed day is not the end of the world. According to a?study?done by scientists at the University College London, “Missing one opportunity to perform the behavior did not materially affect the habit formation process.” That should come as good news for all of us.

But it matters that we get the habit metaphor right. Otherwise, we’ll keep believing that habits are more fragile than they really are. Or worse, that the only way to establish a perfectly good habit is to be perfectly good. It’s just not the case. We can still be human and also create great habits.

The other important insight in thinking of habits as plants is that the deeper the habit’s roots, the less fragile it becomes. So when a habit is young (just like a sapling), it is indeed more fragile. It’s easier for it to come crumbling down for any number of reasons. But once it has been in place for a while and your new habit plant has had a chance to really take root, it can take a lot more of life’s “bad weather” and still hang on.

This is why it makes sense to guard a young habit more carefully as its roots work their way into the soil of your life routines. As William James advised, “In the acquisition of a new habit…we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.” But once the habit has really taken root, it can weather a bit more than the young sapling habit can and still survive. It’s not to say that an “adult habit plant” can’t die — it can. It’s just to say that the fragility of a habit takes place on a continuum, so it becomes less and less fragile the more you do it.

Staying motivated long enough to get your habit to really take root can be a tricky thing. And while you do need the motivation to keep that habit going, sometimes the skill you need even more is to learn how to?restart?your motivation precisely at the moment when you have a bad day. Thinking of habits as plants instead of streaks will help you get there.

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Also published on the?Brain by Design blog?and?in?Better Humans?on February 8, 2023.