Over the past decade I’ve maintained a practice of daily exercise. I’m proud of the fact that I haven’t missed a day despite long periods of turmoil, travel, living a nomadic life, and other life stressors.
Consistency is one of my hallmarks.
I’ve also cultivated a daily meditation practice that’s in its 8th year, and have been publishing a daily blog for over 5 years. My daily journaling streak is in its 9th year.
But I’m not perfect by any stretch.
Confession: I haven’t sent my once-weekly newsletter in well over a year.
Sometimes life happens, we get busy, and we get off track with our daily practices.
You hit a busy season and stop writing. You go on vacation or take a weekend off and fall off your workout routine. You skip meditation one day, and it turns into two days and then weeks or months.
Or maybe you take an intentional break to focus on other pursuits. Sometimes a daily practice can start to feel rote and uninspiring.
How do you start up again after you’ve been on a break?
Any time you take a break from a daily practice, you eventually confront the big challenge of restarting.
When you’re ready to start up again after time off, it can feel daunting. We often feel inertia when starting something new, and that initiation hurdle can feel even more daunting when the “something new” is something you’ve done before.
There’s no fooling yourself this time: you know how hard it will be.
The Best Way to Get Back On Track: Don’t Fall Off
Obviously, the best way address this challenge is to avoid it in the first place. This is why I aim for daily streaks in my workouts, blog, meditation practice, and journaling.
It’s the nature of life that some seasons are busier than others. In those seasons, it’s natural to feel like you “don’t have time” for a workout or writing a blog post, sitting for meditation, or whatever it is that you want to do.
The energy required to initiate momentum is far greater than the energy required to sustain momentum. In the moments when I feel that time crunch, before letting go of any practice I question whether I’m holding myself to too high a standard in the quality of my output.
The key question here is what is the minimum viable effort I can make to keep this streak alive?
Maybe that means limiting yourself to 10 minutes of writing, a 7-minute workout, or a 1-minute meditation practice.
The key is to do what you can to keep some semblance of your routine.
If you can continue to create some space to do the bare minimum when life gets hectic, you’ll find it much easier to ramp up when you have more time.
That said, sometimes life is just giving you too much to hold, and something has to fall off. Nobody is perfect. Personally, I find it more difficult to sustain weekly practices than daily practices.
We can’t go backwards in time to “find a way.”
5 Tips to Get Back on Track After a Break From Your Daily Practice
Whether it’s your daily workouts, your writing, another creative practice, meditation, or any other daily ritual, the process of returning is the same.
Here are 5 tips to get yourself back on track after taking a break from your daily practice:
(1) Mantra: Every Day is Day One
Years ago, I learned a helpful mantra from author and entrepreneur Chris Brogan:
Every day is day one.
Although he offered this mantra in the context of creating a daily streak, this mantra also helps with overcoming the starting inertia. When you consider every day of your streak as if it was day one, then it’s easier to get back on track after falling off because “day one” doesn’t loom larger than life as a big mountain to scale.
If every day is “day one” then “day one” is no big deal.
(2) Go Back to Basics
Always start with the fundamentals.
- Decide what you’re going to do.
- Determine when and where you’re going to do it.
- Schedule it in your calendar.
What’s scheduled in your calendar is real. Put it in and keep the appointment with yourself. If you need to make an appointment with someone else to force yourself back into rhythm, then find a buddy or a coach, or register for a class. Make yourself accountable to showing up.
(3) Meet Yourself Where You Are
It’s natural to want to pick up where you left off, but that doesn’t always work.
Start where you are.
If you’ve taken a few weeks off of exercise, don’t expect yourself to go hard out of the gate. Scale back your weights or do more simple variations of complex movements. Reduce your duration.
If it’s been a while since your last meditation practice, start with a couple of minutes. If you’ve taken a break from writing, start with 250 words.
Start small and do what you can.
(4) Resist the Impulse to Explain Yourself
When we come back after falling off track of a daily practice, a natural impulse might is to offer excuses for why we fell off or to apologize for our performance in our comeback.
Resist the impulse to offer reasons for why you fell off or to explain what you may consider “rusty” output.
It doesn’t matter why you stopped, or how slow you are in your return.
What matters is that you’re here now.
(5) Give Yourself Some Grace
Life is not linear. Time moves in seasons, and we all have seasons where we fall out of our routines. Give yourself some grace for being human.
Beating yourself up for falling off track is a waste of your precious energy and life force.
Remember, no matter what, to treat yourself with compassion. You’re doing the best you can with what you have.
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