{"id":2578,"date":"2017-05-12T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thrivetogether.com.au\/?p=2578"},"modified":"2026-08-21T07:25:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T21:25:50","slug":"create-new-habit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/2017\/05\/12\/create-new-habit\/","title":{"rendered":"Create a New Habit Without Motivation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have you noticed how hard it is to form a new habit? or even break an existing one?<\/p>\n<h2>Motivation<\/h2>\n<p>Forming a new habit will usually take some effort and will involve doing something new. I used to think that the right motivation was the key, but from my experience, motivation is only good for a short term change. If you&#8217;re lucky, you may be able to form a new habit for a while. But what happens when that motivation is no longer relevant and your life changes???<\/p>\n<p>Some new habits will take longer than others to establish. If you are relying on motivation alone to get you to the point where it is a solid long-term habit, you may find you don&#8217;t get there.<\/p>\n<h2>Hesitation<\/h2>\n<p>Motivation is fickle. It&#8217;s not reliable. It can be good to get you started, but it lacks endurance for the long haul! There are and have been a few times when I have needed create new habits, but the busier life was, the harder it was to do. So I started listening to myself and watching how I behaved. And you know what I found? I was self sabotaging,&nbsp;I was hesitating way too often when it just wasn&#8217;t necessary:-<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I hesitated to get out of bed early to exercise<\/li>\n<li>I hesitated to walk out the door to go for a walk as soon as my husband got home from work<\/li>\n<li>I hesitated when I went to get a drink of water and chose a soft drink instead<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And what happened when I hesitated? I talked myself out of it. The longer I hesitated the more difficult it became, to just do it. I came up with all sorts of reasons not to do it. It became an internal struggle against myself. I had to talk myself into doing the &#8220;right&#8221; thing. It sounds a bit crazy, but I&#8217;m not on my own here.<\/p>\n<h2>Your Brain Takes Over<\/h2>\n<p>There is research backing this and many people talking about it. Someone I have been following for a while now is Mel Robbins. Among other things, she talks about motivation being a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LCHPSo79rB4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">load of crap<\/a>. She also explains that as soon as you hesitate, you are giving your brain time to process what is happening, creating a window for it to say &#8220;Hey they hesitated, this isn&#8217;t feeling comfortable, this needs to stop, I need to stop this&#8221;. The brain thinks there is something going on that it needs to protect you from. It&#8217;s a natural instinct. You&#8217;re feeling uncomfortable about what you need to do. You&#8217;d rather stay in bed nice and cosy right? Your brain can&#8217;t tell real danger, from you just being uncomfortable. So it starts working to get you back to your comfort zone &#8212; stay in that nice cosy bed.<\/p>\n<h2>Stop Hesitating<\/h2>\n<p>The next time you make a pact with yourself to do something, listen to your internal dialogue. See if you can recognise the self sabotage happening.<\/p>\n<p>The best way to stop this is to not hesitate, don&#8217;t give your brain a chance to think it through. Take the action, don&#8217;t think about it. Every time you think about doing something rather than just doing it, you give your brain a chance to talk yourself out of it. If you start down the path of talking yourself out of it, try something that Mel Robbins calls the 5-second rule. Count backwards from 5 and as soon as you get to 1, take action! The counting switches the thinking off, stopping the self talk and allows you to break free, to take action.<\/p>\n<h2>Start the New Habit!<\/h2>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t fool-proof, it will take effort, conscious effort. It won&#8217;t make it easy to get on and do what you want or need to do, but it will get you doing it.<\/p>\n<p>I use this to get up before the kids in the morning and do some form of exercise for myself. I definitely have days where I just snooze my alarm. On those days my day feels and runs like crap. It&#8217;s all like an uphill battle.The days i get up and get on with it, I am clear headed, more productive and better able to manage everything running a business and raising 3 kids brings with it.<\/p>\n<p>You probably know what you need to change. Don&#8217;t wait for some milestone or some piece of fickle motivation. Don&#8217;t hit snooze, don&#8217;t hesitate, count down from 5, and do it. Live your life now, don&#8217;t wait for the motivation to come. It may never arrive or be enough to carry you to your destination. Start that new habit!<\/p>\n<h2>&nbsp;<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new habit is hard to create when you are relying on motivation. Stop waiting for motivation, stop hesitating and start acting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":3796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fitness","category-habits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9365,"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2578\/revisions\/9365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.thrivetogether.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}