First, Find Failure

Two weeks ago, I started running again after an extended hiatus. The last time I went for a run I also had not run in a long time and decided it was a great idea to do a 1h05m run.

To the surprise of no one, I fucked up my foot and had to wear around a foot cast for a few weeks with months of discomfort.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this, so this time around I’m starting slow with some 20m runs and taking it real easy. But this has got me thinking:

What most often knocks me out of a habit is hitting a failure point, not losing motivation.

Every time I’ve fallen out of the habit of lifting weights, it wasn’t because I just stopped or got bored, but because I lost all momentum due to an injury or going on a long vacation. When I’ve started playing guitar again and the string breaks and it’s a pain to restring (1), I’ve just stopped.

So now I’m starting to think deeper when starting anew:

What would cause me to stop doing this? How could I mitigate that, prevent it from happening, or prepare beforehand?

It’s easy to just think purely optimistically when starting something new that all you need is the positive optimism to keep going. And this is what most of the literature I’ve read around habits focuses on - but the hardest part of new habits for me is keeping them over a long period and not the initial activation energy.

(1) One time when restringing a guitar in high school it snapped and went through my finger… I may have some guitar-string-changing PTSD…