So what do you do when something comes up that interrupts the routine you’re trying to establish? You have to travel at the last minute, or someone gets sick, or something unexpected happens that requires an enormous amount of time or energy. How do you handle these times, especially early on in the development of a habit?
It will obviously depend on the situation. Sometimes there are times where we truly cannot do what we had planned to do because of an unforeseen crisis. That’s life, and that’s OK. Rather than feel guilty, better to fully engage in the emergency of the moment, and then return to establishing the habit afterward.
However, although these kind of emergency situations do occur, often the situations we find ourselves in aren’t so dire that we have no way of practicing our habit. We may not feel the greatest, or may not be motivated at all, or maybe an interruption has drastically changed our preferred daily schedule, or we’re not in a familiar environment. Yet, if we’re honest, it’s not impossible to practice. We may need to tweak the specifics of what we do to fit the constraints of the situation, but with either a little creativity, or a little bit of willpower (or both), it is imminently possible.
It’s times like these that help highlight the importance of being focused and starting small. If I’m only working on making one change at a time, then it’s easier to make sure I do that one thing, even when my schedule or environment changes. However, if I’m trying to juggle a half-dozen different changes all at once, and then some interruptions come along, it’s far more difficult to be consistent with all the things I’m trying to do.
But even if I’m only working on one habit change right now, if I’ve set up unrealistic expectations of what I will do or how much time I will spend, it’s also easy for interruptions to the daily routine to throw me off track. Better to do something small and do it every single day, than to be unrealistic and never establish a habit.
Being realistic, being flexible, being focused: these are the qualities that can help establish a routine, not only in the normal times, and especially in those times where normalcy gets interrupted.