I wish had a dollar for every time I heard someone say they wish they could just stick to their good habits and not fall off track.

Just ask yourself this: how often have you tried to stick to the good habit of eating a well-balanced diet and have fallen off the wagon a few weeks or a few months later? What about exercise? What about writing?

Here are some tips to deal with habit relapse and get back on track.

1. Why Good Habits Slip?

The thing about good habits is that they require both – work and patience. We need to make a conscious effort over a period of time until the desired behavior starts to feel “natural.” That is, until the good habit starts to feel part of who we are.

If we fail to nourish our good habits before they become part of our identity, there is a big chance that we will experience habit relapse. Relapsing refers to the act of reverting back to the old ways of being and doing. People typically associate this term with drug and alcohol addictions, but it’s a term that also applies to habits; hence the term “habit relapse.”

There are many triggers that cause relapse including: loss of motivation, competing commitments and responsibilities, tiredness, fatigue, and more. We don’t live in a perfect world and we are not perfect human beings. We are all prone to fall off track.

2. Three Rules to Stick to Good Habits

For the sake of keeping this article short and practical, I have narrowed down my list of rules to just three. These are the rules that have helped me restart on my good habits and stick to them.

2.1 Rule #1: Accept Relapse as Part of the Process

It’s easy to feel angry or guilty for not sticking to your good habit. I have been there. I have tried to restart working on my habits out of guilt. It didn’t help. I failed more times than I can remember using the guilt approach.

What worked best for me was to learn to accept that falling off course every now and then is a necessary element in the process of mastery. Once I started accepting (and not resisting) failure, I was in better shape (and better spirits) to restart.

2.2 Rule #2: Don’t Wait Too Long to Restart

The longer you take to restart, the harder it is to actually restart.

I’ve had many times when I was so busy with work that I couldn’t make it to the gym for a few weeks. I kept telling myself, “I am really busy. Once I am through this phase, I will get back to it.” And I ultimately did, but, boy, how I wish I had returned to the gym sooner.

Getting back to the gym was painful. I lost some of my strength. I lost some of my endurance. And the weights felt heavier than ever. And because of that, I wasn’t in the mood to stay at the gym anymore. I lost much of the progress I made in the past few months, and I just wanted to go home.

After many failures, I realized that the difficulty and pain of restarting were that much greater the longer I waited to restart. After trial and error, I found that to minimize pain, I shouldn’t wait until I had time to go to the gym. I needed alternatives, so I started exercising at home until I was able to find the time to go to the gym. This helped me keep my momentum and my habit going.

So don’t wait to restart. Find alternatives and start right now.

2.3 Rule #3: Create Rituals

Creating rituals around your desired habit will make it more likely for you to act on your habit.

Rituals are a set of fixed action patterns. Once you start the ritual, the action steps are released as an entire behavioral episode, and you thus have an entire sequential behavior.

For example, my writing ritual looks like this:

I wake up, make a small cup of coffee and open my laptop. I check my email once and respond to urgent emails – I will respond to your email within 24 hours if you contact me :), and then I give the writing from the day before a quick skim. I then start writing right away. I do this for three hours. I have been using this ritual for 10 years and it has yielded amazing results. While on this, check out my journey of writing 90 blog post in 90 days. SPOILER: I wrote 120,000 words in 90 days!

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