What to do if you break your habit streak

You missed a day. Your perfect streak is broken. Now what? Most people let one slip-up turn into a full-blown setback—but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s how to bounce back fast and keep moving forward.

It's easy to berate yourself and be annoyed at yourself when you break a habit streak. That you now have to start over. That annoyance with yourself can lead you down a path of never restarting. You start to identify with the version of yourself that "can't do this" and you don't attempt to restart. That's an all too common trap when you're trying to start a new habit -- but I think it's easy to overcome. The trick is to reframe it. Failing to maintain a streak, or missing a day, or having even a week go by without doing your new habit -- that's all part of it. It's part of learning how to do something.

This is a common analogy but it's a good one: Think about how kids learn to walk. They don't attempt to stand up, fall down, and then say: "Well, that's it, I'm never going to walk. I fell down. Forget this. I'm just going to crawl for the rest of my life." Nope -- they stand up, fall down, and stand back up. And do it over again, and again, until they manage to stand. Then they try to take a few steps -- fall down. But do it again.

There's a drive in them to do it (which is often helped by the adults around them cheering them on for taking on this endeavor). Think of your habit like a child learning to walk. If you're trying to write every day, and you miss a few days. What do you do next? Simple: write. Keep doing it until you don't think about it anymore. If it's important to you, then keep going, and accept the times you "fail" as easily as a kid accepts falling down when they're learning to walk. There's no ego involved. There's no identifying with being a quitter or a failure. There's just learning.

Now, I want to hear from you—how do you handle it when you break a habit streak? Do you have a go-to strategy for bouncing back? Drop a comment below and let’s talk about it!