Why Perfectionism Stops Us from Creating New Habits - zen habits

When we decide to create a new habit — exercise, healthy eating, meditation, writing — we can get excited and optimistic, and have an idea of how it will go perfectly.

This is such a hopeful time! Unfortunately, reality has other plans.

Our perfect idea of how our new habit will go is pretty much never how it actually goes. We might do really well for a few days or even a couple of weeks, but inevitably we’ll miss a day or two because of tiredness, busyness, sickness, visitors, forgetting, etc. And then things get derailed, because of our perfect idea of how we hoped the habit would go.

Perfection is one of the main obstacles to forming habits. Our hopeful idea of how it will go, and then our disappointment and frustration with ourselves when it doesn’t go that way.

The idea that we should be super consistent and perfect in our habit attempts …  derails us.