5 Tips for Forming a Healthy Habit and Making It Stick

“Practice doesn't make perfect.
Practice reduces the imperfection.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

New Year, ongoing lockdowns, Mondays - all of these could be an opportunity to form a new healthy habit.

While there aren’t truly official guidelines for how often you should exercise, practice yoga or meditation, studies suggest that the more regularly you do it, the greater the benefits. 

However, forming new, healthy habits can be challenging: We’re busy, hard-wired towards instant gratification, and healthy habits don’t always have as immediate results as unhealthy ones. For help with overcoming this hurdle, we can turn to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, and these five helpful tips of his:

1.    Start small

Run/Lift/Flow/Meditate for 20 minutes  once a week.

2.    Increase slowly

After a couple of weeks, progress to 30 minutes, adding another posture or a few more lbs.

3.    Break it up

As the time increases, it’s helpful to break it up into chunks. Once you hit 60 minutes, split it up into two 30-minute practices.

4.    Plan for failure

You will miss a practice, and when you do, just return to it as quickly as possible. Missing a practice won’t detract from your overall progress.

5.    Practice patience

Like any new habit, it gets easier the more you do it. Stick with it!

Some aspects of this article are adapted from my book Restorative Yoga for Beginners, ©Callisto Media Inc, 2019