How to Form Self-Care Habits That Truly Stick

“If we excel in anything, it is in our capacity for translating idealism into action.”
—Charles Horace Mayo

Raise your hand if there’s something you know with certainty would make your life better if you consistently did it.

Maybe it’s eating better. Maybe it’s exercising more. It can be anything, but it needs to be something you know for sure would improve your life.

Okay, you’ve got your thing you know with certainty would make your life better if you consistently did it.

Keep your hand up if you consider yourself someone who cares about yourself and wants the best for yourself.

That is, you’re the kind of person who wants to be happy and healthy. And since you care about yourself, you naturally do your best to do the things that contribute to your health and happiness.

Okay, you’re going to do the thing that’ll improve your life because you care about yourself and want to feel your best.

Keep your hand up if you’ll send me a check made out to your favorite charity in the amount of your monthly income.

I’ll call you six months from now to ask you if you’re doing what you know with certainty would make your life better.

If you’re consistently doing it, I’ll tear up your check.

If you aren’t, I’ll mail your check to your favorite charity.

Is your hand still up?

If it isn’t, you’re certainly not alone.

Many people lack confidence in their ability to form positive habits.

For many people, there’s a gap between knowing what to do and having good intentions and consistently taking great care of themselves in ways that help them add years to their lives and life to their years.

Learning to traverse this gap is everything when it comes to self-care and wellness.

Don’t Just Do it

Nike says, “Just do it.”

This tagline is more helpful for selling sneakers than it is for helping people learn to take great care of themselves.

If it isn’t working for you, this probably will:

Take small, convenient steps in alignment with your values, interests, and strengths while getting plenty of the kinds of support that help you the most.

Contained within this statement are the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation.

In other words, this is how to go from knowing what to do and having good intentions to consistently taking great care of yourself and actually thriving.

Applying these keys is a skill-building process.

Most people rely on mere willpower. The problem with willpower is it’s a finite resource. You only have so much of it each day, week, month, and year. And when other things like work and family require your willpower, you’re often left without enough willpower dollars in your willpower bank to make the decision to shop for nutrilicious food, go for a hike on Saturday morning, or get to sleep by 10 as you told yourself you’d do.

Applying the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation helps you develop skillpower.

When you approach your days with both willpower and skillpower—you’re a lot more powerful.

Human Nature

We humans are immediate-reward, energy-conserving animals.

Unfortunately, many people spend their entire lives fighting against this aspect of human nature. Fighting against themselves.

Applying the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation frees you from this fight.

Doing so embraces this aspect of human nature—and human nature in general—and helps you use it to your advantage.

It enables you to stop fighting human nature and instead leverage human nature.

There’s massive power in human nature. That means there’s massive power in you, if leveraged properly.

That’s exactly what the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation help you do.

On your wellness journey, always remember:

Don’t fight human nature; leverage human nature.

Habits

When I have new people over for dinner, while we’re chatting and I’m cooking, they often say to me something like, “Wow, you eat so well.” They’re speaking to the fact that there isn’t any junk food in sight and instead a colorful array of whole, natural, real food.

They often go on about how hard it is for them to make positive food choices. They tell me how they’re always trying hard to summon their willpower but often come up short. Everything in their body language says, “You must have so much willpower. I wish I did. I guess I’ll keep trying.” They seem tired of trying and failing. They don’t seem like they trust themselves very much.

Even though this happens a lot, I still do a double-take every time.

Because it takes absolutely zero willpower for me to eat well. Zero, zilch, nil, nada.

I don’t do willpower. I do habits.

A habit, by definition, is something you do automatically, and we humans are incredible creatures of habit.

Our ability to do things on autopilot, both to our detriment and for our benefit, is absolutely staggering.

Years ago, I applied the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and habit formation and made eating well a habit.

Now it’s just what I do. It’s effortless. It’s a habit.

As a creature of habit, you’re already doing dozens of things on autopilot every day. Some of them are probably not serving you while others are.

Applying the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation is your chance to form the habits you want to form. To be deliberate about it. To consciously become the person you want to be.

With willpower alone, sometimes you’ll succeed, and sometimes you won’t.

But when you form a positive habit, you own it. It becomes an inextricable part of you, and it serves you well for the rest of your life.

Set Yourself Up for Success

Before we jump into the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation, let’s talk mindset.

There are two important mindsets that’ll set you up for success.

The first critical mindset is an experimental mindset.

As you embark on forming a positive habit, instead of thinking of it as proving you can do it, I encourage you to think of it as discovering how you can do it.

You definitely can do it. Everyone can form positive habits. It’s only a matter of discovering how you personally can do it considering your unique values, interests, and strengths.

You have nothing to prove and everything to discover about yourself in the process of forming a positive habit.

When my clients come back for repeat wellness sessions, naturally, I often ask them how they’re doing with the positive habits they’re working on forming. When they share how they’re doing, we don’t talk about how they passed or failed, we talk about what we can learn that’ll help them take the next steps. We talk about what didn’t go well and what didn’t work well. We talk about what did go well and what did work well. All of this information is helpful.

The second critical mindset is a good-enough mindset.

As you embark on forming a positive habit, instead of thinking you need to be perfect, I encourage you to think about how you could do a good-enough job to get the results you want to get.

This isn’t to discourage excellence. The pursuit of excellence can be very helpful. But the pursuit of perfection absolutely stops people in their tracks.

If you have an all-or-nothing mindset, unless you’re 100-percent certain you can always pull off “all”, you’re choosing “nothing”. It’s “all” or “nothing”.

Let’s say you’re currently forming the habit of having a vegetable salad with chicken and other whole, natural, real foods for lunch at work. Let’s say one day you forget your lunch at home. Let’s say you’re only realistic options are McDonald’s and a local food market with limited options. You can’t fully replicate the salad you ideally want to have. You could decide, “F*** it, I’m going to McDonald’s.” Instead, you could decide, “I’m going to do my very best to replicate the salad I ideally want to have. Even if I can only make something half as good as that, it’s better than eating at McDonald’s, and it’s better than not eating. I’m hungry, and I’m not going to be home until around 6. I’ll do my very best, and I’ll make sure I bring my lunch tomorrow.”

That’s having a good-enough mindset. It’s doing what you can when you can’t do it all. It’s not trying to be perfect. It’s doing your very best and embracing the fact that no one is perfect.

I encourage you to try on these two mindsets and see how they feel. I think they’ll help you relax into the process, and I think they’ll help you succeed.

The Seven Evidence-Based Keys to Lasting Behavior Improvement and Positive Habit Formation

In one sentence, this is what you need to do to form a positive habit:

Take small, convenient steps in alignment with your values, interests, and strengths while getting plenty of the kinds of support that help you the most.

Broken down into seven sentences, this is what you need to do:

1. Get very clear about the habit you want to form.
2. Get very clear about why you want to form that habit.
3. Take small steps in the direction of the habit you want to form.
4. Tie your new habit with your interests. Make it as enjoyable, pleasurable, and fun as possible.
5. Tie your new habit with your strengths. Make it as feasible as possible.
6. Make your new habit as convenient as possible.
7. Garner the personal and professional support that’s most helpful to you.

Let’s go!

Values

Ask yourself:

What habit do I want to form?

Not the habit your physician wants you to form. Not the habit your life partner wants you to form. The habit you want to form.

If you’re not doing this for yourself, you’re not going to get very far.

Identify a habit you want to form. A habit you know will make your life better.

Be very specific, and state it positively.

For example:

I swim for 45 minutes three times a week.

If you don’t get specific, you’ll be in trouble. “I want to eat better,” “I want to exercise more,” “I want to get more sleep,” and “I want to spend more time with my family,” aren’t specific enough.

Statements like these are too nebulous. It’s too easy to avoid taking action on them. They won’t get you very far.

“I have at least two servings of nonstarchy vegetables as part of my dinner at least five days a week,” is very specific. That’s what we’re going for.

Going negative will get you in trouble too. “I avoid eating cake and cookies when I’m stressed,” is negative.

You focus on the subject of your sentences. A person constantly trying to avoid cake and cookies sees them everywhere. They might instead state:

“When I’m stressed, I get some fresh air before I consider having something to eat. If I’m actually hungry, I have some fruit and nuts.”

Now they’re not focused on stress, cake, and cookies, they’re focused on fresh air, relaxation, fruit, and nuts.

Setting out to form a habit that’s personally important to you is all about leaning into your values. It’s about what matters to you. What matters to you is what’s motivating to you. It’ll get you to start taking action.

Values Amplified

Ask yourself:

What will this habit bring to my life?

Look within for your answer. This is your why. It doesn’t matter why other people do this thing. What matters is why it’s important to you.

For example:

Swimming for 45 minutes three times a week helps me maintain my ideal weight and helps me live with a lot of energy and peace of mind. And I’m being a good role model to my kids, and that’s very important to me.

Boom!

Can you feel this person’s why?

Identifying and dwelling in why you want to form a positive habit is incredibly powerful.

It’s not something you do once. I encourage you to do it often.

You could talk about your why with your close ones and your wellness professionals.

You could make a visual representation of your why and put it somewhere you spend a lot of time so you see it often.

You could state your why out loud as part of your morning routine.

Whatever works well for you, I encourage you to truly dwell in your why. It’ll help you keep taking action.

Baby Steps

Ask yourself:

What’s a baby step I could take?

The babier the better. Seriously.

For example:

I’ll swim for 15 minutes twice a week.

Imagine two 50-foot ladders placed next to each on the same wall.

The ladder on the left has rungs that are a foot apart.

The ladder on the left has runs that are 10 feet apart.

The ladder on the left has a person three-quarters of the way up with a big smile on their face.

The ladder on the right has a person at the bottom with outstretched arms and a strained face trying to reach the first rung.

The person on the right can’t even take the first step. They’re left floundering and saying to themself:

“I can’t do it.”

“I knew I couldn’t do it.”

“What’s wrong with me that I can’t do this?”

The person on the left has been successfully taking small steps and getting further up the wall. They’re psyched and saying to themselves:

“I can do this.”

“I’m doing this.”

“Look at me: I’m doing this thing!”

The difference: small steps.

Consider our example person who wants to form the habit of swimming for 45 minutes three times a week.

If they try to do that right away, it’s likely to feel out of their reach. They’re likely to feel like the person trying to reach the rung of the ladder that’s a few feet over their head. Floundering.

But if they start by swimming for 15 minutes twice a week, a baby step for them, they’re likely to succeed. They’re likely to get excited by their achievement and naturally want to keep going.

Take small steps. Experience success. Feel great about yourself. Rinse and repeat.

Before you know it, you’ll be making a lot of progress. Soon enough, you’ll be doing the bigger thing you set out to be doing.

Remember:

It’s hard by the yard; it’s a cinch by the inch.

Interests

Ask yourself:

How could I make this more enjoyable?

Another way to ask the same question is:

How could I tie my new habit to my interests?

You’re much more likely to keep doing something you enjoy.

For example:

I’ll swim for 15 minutes twice a week in the warmer pool at the Y near my office, and I’ll go in the afternoon when the sun is coming in through the windows. I love that.

Unfortunately, many people think things like:

“No pain, no gain.”

“If it tastes good, it’s bad for you; if it tastes bad, it’s good for you.”

They think that they have to choose misery in order to get benefits.

Nope.

No well-adjusted person will put themselves in the position of having to choose between enjoying their life now and being well for years to come.

And when people try to do this, they almost always fail.

No one keeps doing things they hate doing.

This is why people do six-week exercise challenges then don’t exercise for years.

This is why people go on diets then go off diets.

This is why people succeed in fits and starts.

This is why people go on and off the wagon. And on and off. And on and off. And on and off.

This is why very few people who take the approaches espoused by toxic-vapid boot-camp culture and toxic-vapid diet culture succeed in lasting ways.

No one keeps doing things they hate doing.

Conversely, most people keep doing things they love doing!

As you work on forming a new habit, I encourage you to make it as enjoyable, pleasurable, and fun as possible.

Enjoyment is like a magnet that pulls you to an activity. I encourage you to lean into it.

Strengths

Ask yourself:

How could I make this more feasible?

Another way to ask the same question is:

How could I tie my new habit to my strengths?

You’re much more likely to keep doing something you’re good at.

For example:

I’ll swim 15 minutes of mostly backstroke (since that was my best stroke in high school) twice a week in the warmer pool at the Y near my office, and I’ll go in the afternoon when the sun is coming in through the windows. I love that.

Consider a freelance writer. They’re an amazing writer. As a freelancer, they’re also running their own business, so they need to do bookkeeping. They’re terrible at bookkeeping. On most days, they’re likely much more motivated to write than they are to do their bookkeeping.

You might’ve experienced this with your work. Most people get more excited about doing things they’re good at and contributing their strengths to a project and team they’re part of.

I encourage you to think about how you could bring your strengths to the positive habit you’re working on forming.

Sure, sometimes it makes sense to work on improving your weaknesses, but that time isn’t when you’re in the early stages of forming a positive habit.

I encourage you to lean into your strengths until you have some significant momentum and confidence with your positive habit. Then, if you want to work on improving a weakness, you can use that momentum and confidence as a boost.

Convenience

Ask yourself:

How could I make this more convenient?

You want there to be as little friction as possible between you and the execution of your positive habit.

If your positive habit is like a kid learning to ride a bike, making it more convenient is like making sure there are no rocks or sticks in the path of the kid.

You want to proactively make sure there’s nothing in your way.

For example:

I’ll swim 15 minutes of mostly backstroke (since that was my best stroke in high school) twice a week in the warmer pool at the Y near my office, and I’ll go in the afternoon when the sun is coming in through the windows. I love that. I’ll keep my swimming gear in a bag in my car so I always have what I need right there.

By keeping their swimming gear in their car, this person is always ready to go to the pool. If they’re at home and it’s time to swim, they don’t have to look around for anything. If they’re at work, they don’t have to go home first. They can just go right to the pool. There’s nothing in their way. There’s nothing inconvenient about it. It’s practically frictionless.

Support

Ask yourself:

How could I get support with this?

People who ask for and accept support have much more success with forming positive habits than those who try to go it alone.

For example:

I’ll swim 15 minutes of mostly backstroke (since that was my best stroke in high school) twice a week in the warmer pool at the Y near my office, and I’ll go in the afternoon when the sun is coming in through the windows. I love that. I’ll keep my swimming gear in a bag in my car so I always have what I need right there. I’ll invite Julie from work to come swim with me. If I find I’m struggling with my form, I’ll take a few lessons to get the rust off.

I encourage you to garner the personal and professional support that’s most helpful to you.

It doesn’t make you weak to ask for and accept support; it makes you human.

No one does anything truly substantive entirely by themself.

Remember:

Wellness starts with “we”.

Slippery Slopes

I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

The good news first:

As you apply the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation, you’re probably going to have a great experience. You’re probably going to have a lot more success than in the past when you’ve tried to, “Just do it.” This time you’ll be powerfully leveraging human nature.

The bad news second:

You’re human. That means you’re probably going to slip.

Slipping is inevitable, and how you respond to it is critical.

I encourage you to accept yourself and treat yourself like you’d treat a friend in a similar situation. You might say to yourself:

“You’ve been doing awesome. You had a rough day yesterday. Let’s get right back on track, keep going, and make today great.”

I encourage you to remind yourself how important and helpful an experimental mindset and a good-enough mindset are.

Don’t ask yourself, “What’s wrong with me?”

That’ll feel terrible, and it won’t be helpful.

Ask yourself, “What could I do now that would be helpful?”

That’s a way to talk to yourself that tends to feel better and tends to create better results.

Troubleshooting

If you find yourself struggling with your new habit, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you.

It’s probably because you’re not leaning into the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation.

That is, you’re probably fighting against human nature instead of leveraging human nature.

These are the things you might be doing that could be hindering your progress:

1. Your habit isn’t specific enough.
2. You’re not sure why this habit is important to you.
3. You’re taking too big of steps and experiencing failure.
4. You’re experiencing a lot of misery, boredom, and/or pain.
5. Your habit isn’t tied to your existing strengths.
6. Your habit is inconvenient.
7. You’re not getting enough support.

These are the things to lean into to get back on track or accelerate your progress:

1. Make your habit very specific.
2. Get very clear about why this habit is important to you, and dwell in your why often.
3. Take small steps and experience success.
4. Make sure you’re experiencing a lot of enjoyment, pleasure, and fun.
5. Tie your habit to your existing strengths.
6. Make your habit as convenient as possible.
7. Get plenty of support.

Psychology Class

When you do something in alignment with your values, interests, and strengths, you’re using intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic motivation is based on rewards and punishment. You do something to get a reward and/or avoid a punishment. Relying on extrinsic motivation doesn’t work very well for learning to take great care of yourself because it requires a never-ending supply of rewards and/or punishments. In day-to-day life, that just isn’t possible for most people.

But doing something in alignment with your values, interests, and strengths is almost always possible, and doing so provides a never-ending stream of motivation that comes from within.

When you set out to do something and you succeed, when you have those escalating feelings of “I can do this,” “I’m doing this,” and “Look at me: I’m doing this thing!” you’re building self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is task-specific self-confidence. It’s having the confidence you can do something you want to do.

Applying the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation evokes your intrinsic motivation and builds your self-efficacy.

You’re not just following a meal plan and a workout plan and jumping through hoops.

You’re transforming.

In a way that’s in alignment with who you are, in a lasting way, you’re becoming the kind of person who takes great care of themself.

When you take action, when you engage in a behavior, it can have experiential benefits, instrumental benefits, or both.

Instrumental benefits are benefits you might get at some point in the future as a result of doing something. These benefits often include rewards and/or the avoidance of punishments.

Experiential benefits are benefits you get right away when doing something.

Most people think instrumental benefits are enough to get them to do something and keep doing it, but relying on both experiential and instrumental benefits gives you much more leverage.

Let’s say you just finished work and you’re planning to go food shopping for the week to stock up on nutrilicous food. You’ve had a long day, and you’re tired.

You could try to motivate yourself by saying to yourself, “It’s important I go food shopping. It’s important I eat well. I don’t want to get dementia when I’m older like my grandmother did.”

This is relying on instrumental benefits for motivation. You’ll go food shopping because it might help you avoid a punishment years down the road.

If you want to rely on both experiential and instrumental benefits, you could, for example, make a weekly date to meet a friend of yours, go food shopping together, then have tea at the tea shop next door to the food market.

Now food shopping isn’t something you’re doing only to get a future benefit. Food shopping, in and of itself, is a benefit.

You love, love, love your friend. You absolutely love spending time with her. You also love tea, and you love the funky tea shop next to the food market.

If your only reason for going food shopping is to avoid dementia years from now, it can be easy to skip it.

If food shopping also involves having a great time with your friend, tea, and your favorite tea shop, you’re much more likely to go.

Applying the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation ensures you’re using both experiential benefits and instrumental benefits for motivation. For leverage.

Many people think the key to forming a positive habit is being rational.

Continuing with our food-shopping example, you might be getting into your car at work and thinking about the pros and cons of food shopping today or putting it off.

This is a reflective attitude. It’s about making deliberate rational decisions. Being able to make deliberate rational decisions is an important skill, but most people overestimate its power when it comes to things like deciding to go food shopping or not when they’re tired. Most of the time, what determines whether a person goes food shopping or not when they’re tired are automatic affective evaluations. That’s a fancy way of saying we tend to do things that feel good. More specifically, we tend to do things without much thought because it feels good to do them.

It sounds a lot like instant gratification, right?

Instant gratification is often considered an obstacle to forming positive habits. It tends to come with negative connotations.

Continuing with our food-shopping example, you might say going food shopping would be an example of delaying gratification and that going home and watching a funny television show before dinner would be an example of instant gratification.

That might be true if you weren’t meeting your friend and making food shopping an adventure.

Food shopping with your friends gets you both instrumental and experiential benefits.

In other words, because of its experiential benefits, it’s instantly gratifying.

As such, you didn’t have to rely on a reflective attitude to get yourself to do it. You didn’t have to weigh the pros and cons. You don’t have to rely on finite willpower.

You do it because it feels good!

Why wouldn’t you do it since it feels so good?

Since a tendency toward instant gratification is part of human nature, why not use it and make it work for you?

The parts of your brain and the physiological processes involved in making deliberate rational decisions are:

1. Slow
2. Deliberate
3. Expensive
4. Inefficient

This makes them terribly unreliable when working to form positive habits.

On the other hand, the parts of your brain and the physiological processes involved in making automatic affective “decisions” are:

1. Fast
2. Automatic
3. Inexpensive
4. Efficient

This makes them an incredible source of leverage when working to form positive habits.

When you lean into the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation, you tap into and leverage all of this power that is your nature!

Physics Class

Another way of thinking about lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation is through the lens of physics.

Initially, many people find themselves stuck. This is the inertia of ambivalence. You kind of want to improve and kind of want to stay the same. You have one foot in both camps.

To overcome the inertia of ambivalence, you need an infusion of energy. For example, doing something you enjoy or something you’re good at adds energy to the system that is you. It gets you moving. It gets you taking action.

Energy infusions aren’t enough though. To become the kind of person who takes great care of yourself, you need momentum. You need something that helps you keep going.

Leaning into the seven evidence-based keys to lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation does just that. It gets you moving and keeps you moving.

Consider a snowball rolling down a hill.

Before you’re clear about a habit you want to form, there’s no snow in sight. Once you get very clear about the habit you want to form, you’ve got something. Now you’re a small snowball.

When you get very clear about why you want to form that habit, you expand and become a bigger snowball.

When you take your first baby step, you become an even bigger snowball that’s starting to roll down a hill. You’re going somewhere.

When you lean into your interests and strengths, you become a snowball that’s getting bigger and bigger and moving faster and faster. You’re gaining momentum.

When you make your new habit as convenient as possible, you’re making sure there’s nothing in your way so you can continue gaining momentum. You’re creating a practically frictionless environment. Now you’re really moving.

When you garner the personal and professional support that’s most helpful to you, you absolutely take off. Now you have other people running alongside you, cheering for you, and pushing you down the hill.

Maintaining an experimental mindset, maintaining a good-enough mindset, and handling slips gracefully ensure it stays cold enough to prevent you from melting while you’re building your skills and gaining momentum.

Together, this makes you unstoppable.

About Jason Gootman
Jason Gootman is a Mayo Clinic Certified Wellness Coach and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach as well as a certified nutritionist and certified exercise physiologist. Jason helps people reverse and prevent type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other ailments with evidence-based approaches to nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, holistic wellness, and, most importantly, lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation. As part of this work, Jason often helps people lose weight and keep it off, in part by helping them overcome the common challenges of yo-yo dieting and emotional eating. Jason helps people go from knowing what to do and having good intentions to consistently taking great care of themselves in ways that help them add years to their lives and life to their years.