Habit Formation
6 Tips for People Who Struggle with Consistency
How to shed your shame about consistency and get the monkey off your back.
Updated August 24, 2025 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Internet advice stresses that consistency is needed for success in life and self-regulation. If you've tried and failed to build consistent habits, you probably don't feel great about yourself. Try these gentle tips, built on foundational habits science, to help shed your shame about consistency and get the monkey off your back.
1. View Consistency as a Tool, Not a Test
Simply put, consistency is one of the most reliable ways to succeed. It's a powerful tool, but it's easy to fall into self-talk that treats it as more than a tool, like "winners are consistent and losers aren't."
View consistency as a tool suited to particular tasks, like using a powered nail gun for constructing a building instead of a hammer.
When you view consistency as a tool rather than a judgment, you can explore when it's well-suited to the task at hand and take other judgments out of it. For example, you can remove judgments about whether you enjoy consistency or are good at it, and focus on how consistency can serve you in achieving what you want.
2. Some Habits Need Infrastructure
A frustrating but true aspect of habits is that you often need other good habits to sustain the good habit you really want. For example, you might need better habits related to sleep, strength training, or washing your clothes to sustain a habit of running.
Ask yourself: In what ways do I need to make my life more organized and less chaotic to support my consistency at the habit I really want?
Good infrastructure increases habit resilience. For example, if your car breaks down and you can't get to the gym, it's easier to find a new plan to get your exercise done when your other life routines, like your meals, are well organized.
3. Focus on Consistent Frequency Before Adding Volume or Intensity
When you succeed to any degree with a new behavior, it's exciting. It's tempting to bump it up and do more (either by increasing the volume - the overall amount - or the intensity - the difficulty of the work). For example, if you've been consistently posting to one social media platform for a few weeks, don't add another platform, or a new type of content that requires more work.
Until your consistency with your planned frequency is rock solid, don't bump up the energy the behavior requires. Stay consistent at one routine longer than you think you need to, to ensure you can maintain it when life throws curveballs or when the habit is only a background focus, not in the foreground.
Doing less when you're tempted to do more is one of the most important (and hardest) forms of self-discipline.
4. Understand the Rules of Habit Formation, So You Can Apply Them Creatively
The basic building blocks of habits are a trigger, behavior, and reward that form a consistent and automatic sequence. This can seem simple and boring, but the sophistication emerges when you learn to play with these fundamentals.
Let's unpack an example. A habit is an automatic sequence. When I strength train, I follow an automatic sequence for choosing exercises, which involves looking around the weights room, seeing which equipment I like is available, and choosing one of those options. My decision tree is a bit more involved than that, but the point is that it's automatic, and that it occurs in response to a specific trigger (entering the weights room at the gym). That's not the same as doing a prescribed set of exercises, in order, on particular days, but it's still an automatic sequence. Once you understand that a behavior or thought process being automatic is the core of habit design, you can incorporate flexibility within a disciplined approach.
5. Make Sure the Habit Is Rewarding From the Start
Some behaviors are rewarding right from the start, but some aren't. For example, in gamified learning apps, moving up levels is reinforcing. Clear daily successes like completing Wordle work the same way. They give you a daily reward that keeps the behavior going.
If your consistency isn't being naturally rewarded, find a way to make it so, like a recovery routine you do after exercise, deep work, or cleaning your house that you greatly enjoy and savor.
Your self-talk around your habit is one way you make it rewarding. Critical self-talk is punishing. Rewarding self-talk, like emphasizing ways you're becoming more self-disciplined, is reinforcing.
6. Don't Let Influencers Deceive You About What You Should Be Able to Sustain
Influencers sometimes promote habits that are unrealistic, like recommending doing high-intensity interval training every day. Given that even elite athletes can't achieve this, it's highly unlikely you will.
Likewise, if something isn't your primary work, don't expect yourself to sustain the habits of those for whom it is. For example, if you create social media on the side, don't expect yourself to be able to sustain the habits of those who do it full-time.
Social media often promotes streaks, which can also become unhealthy, either because they lead to choices like exercising with injuries or because they become obsessional.
Make sure whatever you're trying to be consistent with is actually sustainable. Don't be afraid or ashamed to adjust if you bite off more than you can chew (attempt more than you can sustain). You experimented and found out your limit.
Greater Consistency and Self-Discipline Are Within Your Reach
It's easy to view someone who is more consistent than you as better. However, a different conclusion is that they've simply become better at using consistency as a tool, and figured out how to avoid the pitfalls that can derail consistency. Try not seeing consistent people as having giant glowing halos. Instead, try viewing yourself as being on the same path, just a different stage of it. Chip away at practicing the principles of consistency outlined here. Practice with tools is what allows us to use them expertly.
