How To Actually Get Back On Track And Make Sustainable Progress

You were making so much progress, until it all came crashing down.

You made one single mistake, and that spiralled further into more mistakes.

So many days have gone by, and you feel like you can never get back to where you once were.

I’ve had countless days just like this.

In fact, I just went through another setback.

I spent 4 days indulging in my bad habits.

From random high-dopamine videos on YouTube to videos on the hub to sugary junk foods and Netflix.

I was a mess.

I couldn't get any work done and had made zero progress in the last few days.

But luckily I was able to pull myself out of this rut, get back on the grind, and start writing this article.

In that same week I was able to get back on my schedule.

So how did I do it?

The Power of Small Gains And Momentum

You see, whenever you experience a setback, you always want to compensate for it by doing more.

For example,

If you missed 2 weeks of gym where you wanted to train 3x per week, you feel bad about it and want to get back the progress you “lost,” so you decide it’s a good idea to train 6x the next week.

This is wrong.

This way of thinking almost always never works.

How could it?

You’ve been depressed for days, or weeks, and you think you can just take massive action right now and will yourself out of that depression?

The opposite of momentum is depression.

When you’re feeling depressed or simply in a rut, it feels impossible to do any work.

In this case, you might just burn yourself out or even injure yourself.

For me, I had stopped writing.

And when I stopped writing I wanted to write for 3-4 hours the next day.

How was that possible?

Unless I had an insanely strong willpower that day, I couldn’t just ignore the slump.

When in the past 4 days I’ve been feeling lazy, tired, unmotivated, burnt out, stressed, angry, and sad (because I lost my momentum), and I haven’t written a single word since.

I was probably experiencing caffeine withdrawals too from quitting coffee.

Small gains will lead to big gains.

You have to start small again, as if you’re a beginner.

Your ego might not agree with it, but you must learn to accept this.

But don’t worry, you only need to do this for a little bit just to get your momentum back up and running.

Once your momentum is back, you’re feeling it, and you naturally start to do more.

For me, I just needed to do a few good habits here and there like reading an interesting book (Oxygen Advantage), eating eggs, and writing for however long I wanted.

Doing these “smaller habits” allowed me to still tick them off on my habit tracker and get the dopamine reward of making some kind of progress.

This progress however small, creates the momentum I needed to do more and more just like I used to.

That is the power of small gains, you just need a little bit of it to get you rolling.

The habit tracker is essential.

Habit trackers are perfect for getting small gains and the momentum flowing.

You absolutely must have a habit tracker if you want to do more of whatever it is you want to do.

Whether you want to exercise every day, write every day, or practice speaking daily, you’re going to have a much easier time with a habit tracker.

Simply write down your desired habits, the dates, and tick them off whenever you do the bare minimum of a given habit.

If you wrote “gym” on your habit tracker, tick if off for the day when you step foot in the gym.

Yep, just stepping foot in the gym is enough to tick it off, regardless of how long you worked out or even if you didn’t workout and just went back home.

You just want to get the repetition in, and the habit of going will start to be subconsciously ingrained into your brain.

When you get more ticks on your habit tracker, you will get a “dopamine reward” and you will feel good.

When you feel good, you’ll want to get more ticks on your board so you go more often.

You’ll also naturally want to do more than just 20 minutes of gym for example, and maybe you’ll train for 30 minutes.

Getting more and more ticks will give you proof of the type of person you’re becoming.

You start to “become” the lifter, or the runner, or the writer, or whatever you desire.

Make a habit tracker right now, and stick it up where you can see if often.

As long as you show up, the rest will follow.

Remember, long-term sustainability is where the magic really happens.

You don’t get bigger when you lift for 2 months, but you do get bigger when you lift for 2 years.

All you need to do is get yourself to show up.

It’s not about doing the heavy squats or leg press for 4 sets of 12, it’s about putting on your gym clothes, stepping out the door, and getting into the gym.

The bare minimum.

Once things get going and you’re warmed up, the next steps will follow.

Like former solider Ant Middleton says, all you need to do is to take one step in front of the other.

Move on, do the bare minimum, and start getting the ball rolling again.

Hope that helped bro.

Laters,

Henry