Maintaining good habits can be incredibly challenging.

While self-discipline and motivation have huge implications in whether or not we manage to stick with our habits, there are some physiological mechanisms at play as well. And one of the biggest of these is stress.

Here's how stress can impact your ability to stick with your habits and what you can do about it.

The Problem

"Sustained stress causes us to fall back on familiar routines. The part of our brain associated with decision-making and goal-directed behaviors shrinks and the brain regions associated with habit formation grow when we're under chronic stress." — Linda Stone in Manage Your Day-to-Day

Chronic stress leads us to reverting back to easier habits and routines — meaning you're more likely to fall back to bad habits when you're stressed out. It's also a whole lot harder to start or maintain new, good habits.

It's likely that this makes things easier on our brains — if we're already dealing with so much, why would it make sense to add in more stress in the form of creating new habits? Creating new habits is really hard work and takes a whole lot of mental energy.

"Why should the stressed brain be prone to habit formation? Perhaps to help shunt as many behaviors as possible over to automatic pilot, the better to focus on the crisis at hand. Yet habits can become ruts, and as the novelist Ellen Glasgow observed, "The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions." — Natalie Angier, New York Times

What You Can Do

The main solution for this problem is to get right to the root of it — which is the stress.

We need to address the chronic stress before looking for hacks to make habits easier. If you're stressed out, your brain is already tired and busy with other things.

There are myriad ways to do this, including:

Look to see how you can incorporate some of these practices into your routine to help mitigate stress.

Chronic stress can make it so much more difficult to stick with our good habits.

While we can't always completely get rid of stress, we can take steps to help reduce our stress levels. Incorporating some practices into our routines every day can help us with this, which will, in turn, make our brains better able to deal with the load of new habits.

Take some time to address your stress levels, before trying to implement new habits.

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