So there’s something you’d like to start doing more often, but you just can’t seem to find the motivation. Perhaps it just seems too daunting, or you don’t have the time for it. If you have a good deal of discipline, and want to make it a daily habit, you could try a 30 Day Trial. But perhaps you don’t want to establish a daily habit, and you aren’t sure how to carve time out of your busy schedule for such an endeavor anyway. I have an alternative that has worked well for me.
Deprive yourself of the activity you can’t motivate yourself to make a regular habit. I recently used this idea to start exercising regularly. An hour three days a week seemed like a big commitment to me. The truth is, it isn’t, but it felt like it would be. In fact, when I told myself I was going to work out for one hour three days a week, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. But, I did something different this time. I told myself I’m only going to do one half hour workout no more often than two days a week. That way, I won’t burn out on the activity.
Of course, there’s an interesting psychology at work here. I’m not allowed to work out more than two days a week. You know what you want to do when you aren’t allowed to work out? Suddenly, you want to work out! People want the forbidden fruit. I’ve been working out for a month now, and there’s no desire at all to stop. In fact, I want to work out more. I’ve already dropped my requirement for limiting exercise to a half hour each day I allow myself to exercise. I’m still maintaining the two days a week requirement for now, but I’ll likely drop it at some point, and do three days a week as is generally recommended.
Of course, this reverse psychology isn’t limited to just working out. You could do this for any habit you’d like to establish on a basis of a few times a week. Perhaps you want to start updating your website more often. Or spend a few days a week outside. Deprive yourself of it, and it will start to seem like something that’s really worth doing.
Of course, this still takes some discipline in it’s own way. You still have to actually get up and do something. However, if you miss a day, you can make it up later, or forget about it guilt free, because you haven’t broken any of the guidelines you set up. For me, it wasn’t frustrating to miss a work out going about it this way, because I wasn’t failing to meet my goal. Though later on it was frustrating to have missed that work out because it was one less workout I’d done, but engendering the desire to do so more often is the overarching goal of this. So it ended up feeding my want to work out more in the end.
This method won’t be for everyone. However, for some people, I imagine this will be an effective means to establish a new habit without a lot of up front effort. Forcing yourself to do something seems like work. If you force yourself to do the opposite of what you want, eventually you’ll establish the habit you want, because doing the habit you don’t want will just seem like too much effort.
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Tags: Personal Development