this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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How do you keep consistency? (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by marin@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org
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I'm really bad at sticking to things. Every time I try to do something slow and good for me, I do it for a month or two tops and I just revert back into the habits that are bad for me.

For example, I did weightlifting for 2-3 months and I had a lot of fun doing it but I just slowly lost interest and stopped. I did daily journaling and meditation and it gave me a lot of peace and clarity but it only took one mental breakdown for me to quit. I read books daily for a month but I eventually got sucked back into consuming mostly digital media.

I know that all of the former activities were good for me and I genuinely enjoyed doing all of them but I just eventually get sucked back into my old bad habits. How do you break away from that?

For some additional information: I get therapy every 2 weeks and I'm not on any medication. Clinically diagnosed with depression and anxiety

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[–] PotentiallyAnApricot@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is only my own experience , but the thing that helped me was realizing that I can always come in and out of habits or hobbies I enjoy. But above all: if I tried to integrate something into my life and it didn't stick, that means I was going to hard. Radically chilling and making sure the changes I was trying to implement were easy, comfortable, gradual and sustainable is what allowed me to be a person who does stuff I want to do. And I still miss days, clusters of days or even weeks sometimes- that's ok. Things I do are mainly "things I do much of the time". Removing that feeling of failure and deciding to just shrug and get back to it at my leisure actually made me do the things I wanted to do more consistently.

[–] marin@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll keep the "easy, comfortable, gradual and sustainable" in mind. This is really helpful especially because I've been raised in a very pressuring environment where mistakes were condemned and the shaming penetrated through the bone. It's been a year since I got out of that environment but I still can't shake off the unrealistic expectations put on me. I should be in charge of my own parameters of success and happiness.

[–] PotentiallyAnApricot@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I can definitely relate. It’s taken me years to kind of start to begin to recover from similar conditioning. Positive things aren’t supposed to hurt or be exhausting at all, but there’s so much indoctrination to the contrary. I wish you good luck and low stress. You’re right, those parameters are yours to decide.