Building healthy self-care habits doesn’t have to be so hard. Learn why new habits fail and five principles for taking a more practical approach.
For a society inundated with “get healthy” marketing, we are not very healthy. It’s not a knowledge issue, it’s a habit issue. We are terrible at building healthy self-care habits.
Even with the best of intentions, it can be difficult to start and stick with new habits. Why? Change is hard. Yet, it doesn’t have to be so overwhelming.
I know, because I’ve failed at it many times myself. I knew what I should be doing to care for my physical and mental well-being, but just couldn’t stick with it. Last year that changed.
When I made my Commitment to Calm, I shifted to a more practical approach to habit change. Below is a description of how I successfully established new habits, reasons why many new habits fail, and five principles for building healthy self-care habits.
Building healthy self-care habits: How I made the shift
In 2020, I was at a breaking point. My anxiety was out of control. It grew from a smoldering flame into a full-blown dumpster fire. My mental and physical health were spiraling out of control, and I was at a new low for self-care.
For more on my struggle with overwhelming anxiety and physical illness, read this!
Although I was given two physical illness diagnoses, my anxiety was nothing new. My level of anxiety was at an all-time high. That’s when my doctor sat me down for the “maybe you should think about medication” talk. While there is nothing wrong with taking medication, I had been down that road already.
It was important to fully explore my alternatives before taking medicine again. I knew there were effective, evidence-based ways to manage my stress and anxiety. Again, it wasn’t a knowledge issue. It was a habit issue. I would start and stop, never able to make self-care a consistent habit.
This time around, I wanted to do things differently. I learned from my past mistakes, took a more practical approach, and was able to build new healthy self-care habits that actually stuck.
A year later, self-care is a habit. My anxiety is better than it’s been in twenty years. I’m still a work-in-progress but I’m in a physically healthier and mentally calmer state than ever before.
There’s nothing special about my success. There was no magic pill or secret solution. Rather, my success in implementing change was in my approach. If I can learn to do this, you can too.
Before you initiate a new self-care routine, consider the five reasons why new habits fail. Instead of repeating past mistakes, follow these five principles for building self-care habits that stick.
5 Reasons healthy self-care habits fail
1. New habits fail when we focus on the wrong starting point.
When I started seeing my current therapist, I was in a bad spot. Months prior, my dad passed away in both drawn-out and sudden ways. After a stroke, a 10-hour brain surgery, and one month in and out of consciousness in the ICU, I held onto him as he choked and struggled to breathe in the back of a van. He left this world shortly after arriving at the hospice facility. I was told he had weeks; it was minutes.
It took me a long time to even start to process the pain. I was drowning in anger and exhaustion. Simple tasks like making the kids lunches were exhausting. That’s when I finally booked a therapy appointment. My counselor’s first suggestion was to get help with the kids. She wanted me to have more down time, which seemed pointless to me at the time.
How could a few hours here and there help me deal with my dad’s death? And what was I supposed to do during that time? Nothing? Shouldn’t I be working on alternative ways to deal with my depression and anxiety? Weren’t there things I should do?
The first couple breaks I had, I didn’t know how to relax or enjoy it. I laid in bed and watched TV, feeling guilty. Yet, over time, these little breaks helped me feel calmer and more rested. I gained energy to slowly start working on some of my basic needs, like good sleep and a reasonable diet. Once my basic needs were met, we could shift the focus to bigger issues, mainly my grief.
In hindsight, those breaks for doing nothing weren’t a waste at all. It’s what I needed. I was living in a pressure cooker that was about to explode. I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with big issues. The steam in the pressure cooker had to be released before I could make any progress.
A more practical approach to building self-care habits:
We can’t address big issues if the little issues aren’t being taken care of first. This is what gives us a foundation to grow, experiment, learn, and improve. We need space, time, and energy to do the work.
Principle #1 for building healthy self-care habits: START RIGHT
If you want to adopt better self-care habits, start with the basics. Starting with the right focus allows you to build a strong foundation. It increases your bandwidth to tackle larger issues. It doesn’t make sense to start off with the goal of meditating for an hour a day when you aren’t even getting a good night’s sleep or proper nutrition.
Nothing can take the place of the basics. Make sure you get enough sleep, drink plenty of water, and eat a mostly nutritious diet. These are the basics.
Once you’ve started meeting your basic needs, make time for self-care. You don’t have to know exactly how you will spend your time. In fact, many of us simply must get comfortable doing nothing. In the beginning, it’s simply about scheduling “me time.”
Once your basic needs are getting met, you can expand to more ambitious self-care goals like daily meditation or gratitude practices.
2. Healthy habits fail when we don’t make self-care our priority.
I’d love to say I was successful at developing self-care habits because I’m enlightened. But that’s simply not the case. My self-care habits stuck this time around because the pain of stagnation was greater than the pain of changing. I realized it was up to me to make these changes if I didn’t want to be miserable. If it was going to happen, I had to accept ownership and put in the work. Simply put, I finally made it a priority.
I know I’m not alone in my struggle to prioritize self-care. I failed in the past because I allowed other things to take my time and attention. It’s a harsh but honest truth. Sometimes it was a justified distraction, like caring for my children. But there were plenty of other times when I just wasn’t doing the work. I allowed distractions like the to-do list, TV binge watching, or scrolling my phone to fill my spare time.
I had to admit that each time I picked up my phone or turned on the TV, I was making a choice to not do the work. Without realizing it, I was allowing these automatic responses to take precedence over my mental and physical health.
To counter this, I had to make self-care a priority. No matter what was on the to-do list or what notifications were chiming on my phone, I promised myself I would take ten minutes for self-care. I proactively managed my time.
A more practical approach to building self-care habits:
If it’s not a priority, it’s not going to happen. Plain and simple. All of us are busy with real obligations, grappling with emotional baggage and excuses, and navigating competing forces vying for our attention and energy. That will never change. If we want to build healthy self-care habits, it must be prioritized.
Principle #2 for building healthy self-care habits: PRIORITIZE SELF-CARE
If you can learn one thing from my story, let it be this: Only you can prioritize your self-care. If there’s time for social media scrolling, Zillow dreaming, and Netflix binge watching, there’s time for self-care. You simply have to prioritize your time.
In organizational psychology, we teach people to better manage their time by considering if a task is urgent and/or important. Urgent tasks usually have a time constraint and demand immediate attention, like a project deadline or paying bills. Important tasks have outcomes we care about, but aren’t necessarily time-bound, like product development or building social connections.
If you classify self-care as important but not urgent, it’s easy to blow off. When you fail to take care of yourself, eventually it becomes urgent (like my uncontrolled anxiety). It’s much harder to start from a place of urgency because there’s no bandwidth (see lesson #1 above).
Instead, you can prioritize self-care by scheduling (and honoring the commitment) as if it’s an important and urgent task. If you like mornings, get up 15-minutes early and spend time on yourself. If you’re a night owl, spend 15-minutes before bed doing something you enjoy. If you feel you don’t have any time for self-care, find self-care habits you can do while stopped at red lights. There are infinite options, you just have to find what works by making it your priority.
3. Healthy habits fail when we are motivated by the wrong things.
I’ve started and stopped diets, exercise programs, meditation practices, and countless other healthy habits in the past. I’d take the typical approach by deciding I needed to change, setting a goal, and then going full throttle until I burned out or lost interest. Even when the habit was good for me, my motivation would eventually dwindle.
In hindsight, these initiatives were never for the right reasons. I was always looking to fix myself. The pressure I felt to change came from an external voice. I thought I had to look a certain way, prove myself, be productive, and on, and on. It wasn’t about caring for myself or meeting my needs. I was a problem in search of a solution.
When I started this journey, I incorrectly assumed it was simply about doing self-care. While it did require me to engage in new behaviors, it also required me to truly consider my “why.” Why did I want to move and meditate? Why did I want to learn to be present and grateful?
Shifting my “why” from an external force to an internal force was necessary. It wasn’t about meeting cultural ideals, looking a certain way, or doing the right things. Instead, my focus was on feeling better.
This time around, I had an overwhelming desire to care for myself and to make the most of the life I have. Each time I engaged in an act of self-care, I felt better. The next day, I wanted to keep going because I enjoyed the benefit. I found myself wanting to care for myself instead of feeling like I had to check off a box.
In other words, my motivation moved from an extrinsic to an intrinsic source. It’s similar to caring for a child. You don’t do it because you’re supposed to, you do it because you love them and want them to be happy and healthy.
This distinction may seem subtle, but it had a huge impact on my motivation to stick with it. Internal motivation will always trump external motivation. It also comes with less pressure.
Essentially, self-care became a way to foster my relationship with myself. At times the work was hard, because I was forced to acknowledge my faulty coping mechanisms. I had to lean into letting go of these ineffective coping mechanisms, learn to sit with some tough emotions, and develop a more compassionate relationship with myself. This was made possible by the internal drive to care for myself.
For more on the challenges of mindful behavioral change read this!
I had to be present, aware, curious, and without judgement to make this happen. In other words, I had to learn how to be mindful. Mindfulness wasn’t a term I used when I first started my Commitment to Calm, but it quickly became the pathway for creating lasting habit change.
As I let go of some of my destructive patterns and habits, I made room for more effective self-care. Activities like meditation, yoga, and a gratitude practice weren’t done to check off the task list. Rather, these self-care habits became a way to care for myself, my new coping mechanisms.
A more practical approach to habit change:
We all internalize the cultural message to be healthy without realizing the pressure comes from an external force. External motivation is short-term, less effective, and more likely to lead to burnout than intrinsic motivation. Our motivation to start and stick with new healthy habits must come from the desire to care for ourselves. Mindfulness facilitates this effort.
Principle #3 for building healthy self-care habits: MINDFUL MOTIVATION MATTERS
Self-care is not about simply filling your time with healthy habits. You’re not just checking off a box. Instead, it’s about learning, witnessing your life in a new light, and adapting based on this personal growth. The motivation must come from self-love, which is facilitated through mindfulness.
To be mindful is to be purposeful, remain present in the moment, and suspend your self-judgments. You can use this awareness and nonjudgement to make connections between thoughts and actions.
Mindfulness helps bring to light the patterns that make you feel stuck. Over time, ineffective coping mechanisms become less desirable. Not because you think it’s something you shouldn’t be doing, but because you internalize how bad it makes you feel.
At the same time, mindfulness can help you experiment with new, healthier coping mechanisms. Each time you engage in an enjoyable self-care activity, pause to be present for yourself. Savor the experience to reinforce the connection between self-care and well-being. This mindful pause reinforces the habit, boosting internalized motivation the next time around.
Thus, mindfulness can help you both break ineffective habits and build new, healthier habits. It helps you take ownership of your role in building self-care habits and shifts the focus to intrinsic motivators.
4. New habits fail when we try to change too much at once.
As an uptight, Type-A, overachiever in my former life I worked quite a bit on goal setting, both personally and professionally. I set personal goals for anything from weight loss to completing my doctoral dissertation and helped employees and managers set professional and organizational goals as a business consultant and trainer.
Goal setting alone wasn’t the problem. Goals are amazing because they help us focus our attention and provide us with motivation. My problem was taking on too many goals and trying to make huge changes all at once. I would lose sight of my purpose. Why did I want to change in the first place? It wasn’t to feel overwhelmed.
Building healthy self-care habits failed when I took on too much. I had a goal for everything: exercise, meditation, gratitude, reading, time outside, social connections, etc. I had unrealistic expectations. All the tasks needed to be done perfectly on the daily. It would get overwhelming when I couldn’t do it all, and I would end up abandoning all efforts.
A more practical approach to habit change:
Building healthy self-care habits is about feeling better by caring for ourselves, not checking a box on a goal setting spreadsheet. Although it’s important to track progress in a way that allows us to reflect on our growth, it’s not a black-and-white process. Creating rigid or unattainable goals makes it impossible to establish a self-care routine that sticks. Instead, we need to start small.
Principle #4 for building healthy self-care habits: THINK SMALL
The best way to develop self-care habits is to start small. Focus on one activity or a specific, but small amount of time. For example, when I started, I wasn’t sure which self-care habits were going to work for me. So, I wrote a list of four things I could choose from: stretching/yoga, connecting with my breath/meditation, practicing gratitude, and doing something pleasurable.
There was no expectation to do all activities every day. The only requirement was that I had to do something to care for myself for 10 minutes per day. I made it so easy that it was hard to argue I didn’t have the time. Plus, if I didn’t feel like meditating one day, I could do something else. I had flexibility without pressure or guilt.
Starting small allowed me to create early wins and build momentum going forward. It was a slow process that expanded over time. Research shows this is the best way to create sustainable change.
Focusing on small, manageable goals is one of my favorite lessons from The Happiness Advantage. For more lessons, read this!
Think of building healthy habits as analogous to redecorating your home one design element at a time. You find a piece of art or furniture you love. You put that in the room and then slowly build around it. It may take longer, but you’ll end up with a room filled with treasures. It’s a better representation of your style, something to last a lifetime. It’s far better than a room filled with meaningless things bought all at once.
Once one small act of self-care becomes a habit, it’s a good time to expand by adding another habit or expanding your time commitment. The key is to always start small and be reasonable. Make it so the habit is easy and doesn’t feel burdensome. Know that every little bit is enough.
5. New habits fail when we are plagued by perfectionism.
In the past, my perfectionism often caused me to prioritize busyness and strive for impossible ideals. Perfectionism made me think productivity was most important and any form of self-care needed to be done perfectly. From the perfectionistic perspective, self-care never felt like enough.
For a in-depth discussion of perfectionism and how to counter it, read this!
Allowing perfectionism to dictate my habits set me up for failure for two reasons. One, self-care isn’t a single task that can be checked off the to-do list. My perfectionism made me feel like if I wasn’t doing something, I wasn’t accomplishing anything worthwhile. When I tried to build healthy self-care habits, my internal perfectionist said, “Self-care isn’t productive. Do something on the task list instead.”
Two, when I tried to care for myself, my perfectionism made me focus on doing it right. The perfectionist said, “It’s not enough,” or “You’re not good at this.” I felt overwhelmed by fear of failure and a need to be busy. Perfectionism shunted the freedom and curiosity needed to grow, experiment, and have fun with the process.
I learned to shift my perspective. I differentiated between “doing” and “being.” Tasks were a way to do work, not to be calm. Plus, the task list was self-replenishing. Each time I checked something off the list, a few more items popped up. I couldn’t wait for the moment to be perfect or until I had everything done.
In addition, I had to accept the experimental nature of learning new habits. There isn’t one right way to care for ourselves. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing either. I had to accept that building healthy self-care habits would be a messy process. There was no room for perfectionism.
Each time I practiced self-care, no matter how small, I recognized it as a success. If I had a frustrating meditation experience, I viewed it as a learning opportunity. This gave me the freedom to experiment with new habits. It wasn’t about being busy or doing something flawlessly. Instead, it was about practicing and growing.
A more practical approach to habit change:
Perfectionism not only makes it hard to prioritize self-care, but it can inhibit our ability to experiment with different healthy habits. If we’re rigid, idealistic, or concerned with getting everything right, we’re not open to learning to care for ourselves in new ways. Self-care can never be good enough or worthy enough if we approach from a place of perfectionism.
Principle # 5 for building healthy self-care habits: PROGRESS IS IMPERFECT
For self-care habits to stick, you must recognize that it is a process. There will be ups, downs, and missteps. As such, progress is neither perfect nor linear.
Growth and change come from experimenting with curiosity, not the pursuit of an impossible ideal. The process is much messier than IG posts and memes would have you believe, so your expectations need to be more realistic.
When you accept that this won’t be perfect, you can let go of the pressure to get this right every time. When you have a bad day or fail at a habit, don’t let that derail you. Think of all the little baby steps you’re making rather than the one misstep.
Perfectionistic strivings, or having high personal standards, isn’t all bad. Wanting to do better and holding yourself to a high standard is fine as long as it’s balanced. This requires you to abandon all-or-nothing thinking.
In addition, recognize patterns in your self-care efforts. It’s better to look at overall patterns since the process isn’t linear. In general, are you doing better? Have you made an effort? Even just thinking about a self-care habit can be progress when you’re not plagued by perfectionism.
For a better understanding of nonlinear change, read this!
When you expect nonlinear progress, you won’t be surprised when things don’t go as expected or intended. Instead, you can view these as opportunities to learn about your triggers or the distractors in your environment. Practicing awareness in these moments IS progress. Even backwards progress can be a success when we learn from it.
To counter perfectionism, it helps to practice both mindfulness and self-compassion. This is partly why the third principle is so important. Recognize your own shortcomings as part of the shared experience of life. It’s simply part of being a human. Hold your perfectionistic expectations in mindful awareness, noting them when they occur without reacting to them.
For more on self-compassion and ways to practice it, read this!
Allowing for an imperfect process will help you build healthy self-care habits that stick. Each time you engage in self-care, you are building the habit. AND each time you get sidetracked and learn from it with awareness and curiosity, you are reinforcing the process. With this mentality, you can counter the perfectionistic, “It’s not enough,” with, “This is an expected part of the process.”
Building healthy self-care habits is possible if you take a principled, practical approach.
Last year brought a huge transformation for me. I committed to self-care in a new way and established healthy habits that were previously a struggle. It wasn’t always easy, it took time and patience, and it’s still a work-in-progress. But it’s doable.
There’s no mystery to changing habits. It’s about being practical. Start right, prioritize self-care, be mindful of your motivation, start small, and expect an imperfect process. Follow these principles and you can be successful too.
One day, one hour, one act of self-care at a time, you can do this!
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