3486: The #1 Reason People Fail at 30-Day Challenges by Steve Pavlina on Building Healthy Habits

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[00:00:58] This is Optimal Health Daily. The number one reason people fail at 30-day challenges. By Steve Pavlina of stevepavlina.com. And I'm Dr. Neal Malik, your host. Hello and welcome back to another bonus Sunday episode. This is where I share an episode from one of the other podcasts in our network where we read articles to you.

[00:01:20] Today's post comes from my brother's podcast, Optimal Living Daily, where articles covering mindfulness, personal development, and minimalism are read to you every day. You can find and subscribe to or follow that podcast. Just search for Optimal Living Daily wherever you're listening to this. And with that, here's my brother Justin with the post and his commentary as we optimize your life.

[00:01:47] The number one reason people fail at 30-day challenges by Steve Pavlina of stevepavlina.com. Many people fail with 30-day challenges, usually not making it past the first week. And the number one reason for failure is that they didn't make a crystal clear commitment to do a specific activity for all 30 days. Giving your mind a clear enough commitment is a key to success with 30-day challenges.

[00:02:12] Committing to five minutes per day of a specific activity in a specific location at a specific time of day is usually a lot more effective than a vague commitment to do some exercise each day. A clear commitment is binary. Either you did it or you didn't. There's little or no wiggle room to give yourself credit for non-compliance. If you say you're going to exercise for 30 days in a row, then does walking count? What about cleaning? Decluttering? Grocery shopping?

[00:02:41] If you racked up some credits on your Apple Watch for moving a bit, will you count that as your exercise for the day? If you were to ask 10 different people if you've successfully completed your challenge for the day, would they always agree? If it's not certain that every reasonable person would agree, your challenge definition is probably unclear. If your definition of success is vague, it's almost a given that you'll see your standards slip as you go. And within a week or two, your 30-day challenge will have faded completely.

[00:03:09] Then you'll beat yourself up for not being disciplined enough. Lots of people have never completed even one 30-day challenge, and they think it's due to a lack of discipline. It often is, but not in the way you might think. When I do a 30-day challenge, most of the discipline happens before day one. It's the mental discipline to clearly decide on the parameters and make a real decision to do the challenge. I get myself to the point of being all in before I start.

[00:03:37] The discipline happens in the pre-challenge setup work. This may also include enlisting social support and clearing out any naysaying influences. If I've decided to do the challenge, I'll do it, but my brain needs to understand the nature of the commitment before I feel like I'm all in. I need to set myself up to succeed in advance. If I don't frame the challenge properly, I'll fail at it just like everyone else. I also understand the long-term importance of nailing these challenges.

[00:04:04] If I get good at them, I can leverage these challenges to kick off many new explorations, or build new skills, create new habits, and more. The long-term payoffs for success are huge. For instance, I've been vegan for 22 plus years because I started with a challenge to go vegan for just 30 days. Similarly, if you keep stringing yourself along with one failed challenge after another, you're setting yourself up for decades of disappointment.

[00:04:31] So if you're going to do these, stop kicking your ass on day 10 when you realize you've already quit, and pre-kick your ass 10 times harder before you even begin day one. When you're doing a 30-day challenge, honoring your commitment has to be one of the most important parts of your life. If you keep stringing yourself along with failure after failure, you're hurting your future self. When people succeed with the 30-day challenge, the success happened mentally and emotionally before day one even started.

[00:04:59] There's usually clear evidence that a real commitment has been made. It's the difference between telling a friend, let's get together sometime, versus agreeing to meet at a specific time and place, and being absolutely certain that you're going to show up. Think of it like a legal contract. You want the details of the agreement with yourself to match the overall intention. A contract that merely says, let's agree to do some stuff this month, is likely to go nowhere.

[00:05:24] Same goes for a BS declaration like, work on my social skills, or improve my productivity. If your intention is so vague that I can't accurately predict what you'll be doing each day, you probably won't make it past the first week. Write down your 30-day commitment before you begin. Then rate it on a 1 to 10 scale where a 1 is super vague like improve my finances, and a 10 is clear language suitable for a legal contract.

[00:05:50] In my experience, most people won't score higher than a 3 with this rating. They've set themselves up to flake in advance, just the way any flake would. Let's get together sometime. Sure, let's do that. At least 80% of success with the 30-day challenge happens before day one. Did you fully commit to a clear and specific activity? Was it defined well enough that a lawyer would approve of the clarity and specificity?

[00:06:15] Sometimes I need to play it safe when a challenge can be risky, and I give myself an out if I think I need it. I did that with the water fasting challenge. I didn't feel safe to 100% commit to many days with no food, so I made a list of potential problems to familiarize myself with the danger signs, and I gave myself room to quit if I perceived that my health was at risk. I had no significant problems though and ended up doing it for 40 days. A legal contract can have these kinds of exemptions too.

[00:06:43] So it's fine to practice risk management when there are practical risks to consider. When you gain enough experience with these challenges, and you can trust that your internal standards will be high enough, you can sometimes use a more vague definition and get away with it. But even so, it's still usually better to be specific. Think of your contract with yourself as the floor, not the ceiling, of what you're going to do. You can always outperform the specs of a contract. But when you have a rough day, you may sometimes do only the minimum,

[00:07:12] so make sure that minimum is good enough to satisfy you and get some decent results. You can do more when you're feeling up to it. Whenever you attempt to make a change in your life patterns, some part of your brain is going to resist. It expects the old patterns to continue, and it freaks out a bit when the input changes. That's normal. But you'd better be aware of the existence of this part of yourself, and you need to intelligently compensate for it. A good way to do that is with a clear commitment that's fully understood.

[00:07:40] This helps your brain get into sync with the new expectations before you begin. If those expectations are fuzzy, your brain won't successfully get past this freak-out period, and it will use whatever wiggle room you permitted to pull back to your old reality, even if that reality wasn't serving you well. When you fail at a 30-day challenge, there's a reason for it. For most people, that reason for failure could have been spotted at the start of day one, the lack of a clear and committed decision. They flaked on the challenge before it even started,

[00:08:10] and there's little chance of making it past the first week. They didn't do what it took to succeed in advance. Actually doing a 30-day challenge tends to be very rewarding, motivating, and fun, if you've set it up correctly. The discipline required to complete such a challenge isn't as much as it seems, again, if you've set it up correctly. My favorite 30-day challenges have been those that introduced me to new modes of living. They expanded my possibility space. They permanently shifted my relationship with reality.

[00:08:40] Some are still paying dividends years or even decades after I did them. You just listened to the post titled, The Number One Reason People Fail at 30-Day Challenges by Steve Pavlina of StevePavlina.com. Now, it's just me and a small team behind this show, so I get how much the right hire matters. When you need the right person, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

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[00:09:36] to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Hey friends, Olivia from OLLI. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting,

[00:10:05] you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where OLLI comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fan chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on OLLI.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. If there's anyone I trust on advice for doing 30-day challenges, it's Steve.

[00:10:34] He's done so many life experiments where he'd set it as a 30-day challenge. And like he mentioned, some of them stuck, and he's still doing those things today. I had a couple that stuck for myself. One was tracking my income and expenses. That started as only a week-long challenge, technically. But I was held accountable because it was a homework assignment in business school. But I liked the idea of that so much after that week, that I kept doing it for a month, then six months, and I'm still doing it almost 10 years later. But Steve makes a good point.

[00:11:04] Defining it clearly of what constitutes a success for each day of the challenge is important. But that should do it for today. Hope you're having a great day, and I'll be back tomorrow as usual, where your optimal life awaits. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.