Imagine you’ve decided to change a habit – for instance, you’ve decided you’re going to replace time watching Netflix with time reading a book.
For most people, the next step is encountering a familiar foe I call habit change frustration. You’ll find yourself struggling to break old habits easily and will get frustrated.
And that frustration will likely build over time. If you have some form of weekly review system, you’ll realize you’re performing woefully against your goal.
That’s when you’ll find yourself with two choices –
(1) The default choice will be to simply give up on the goal. You’ll find some justification for that decision and move on.
(2) The non-obvious choice will be to continue living with the habit change frustration.
The benefit of doing so is that you keep the tension. That tension will keep building till it hits a point when you’ll decide to make the change.
I’ve had experiences with some habit changes that took months before the switch flipped.
The tension that causes habit change frustration is a feature, not a bug.
