Struggle of Consistency

I’m not really someone who struggles to start something new, and I think that’s one of the blessings I have. I get inspired by different things, and my curiosity drives me to test my potential and explore the world around me.

However, the real struggle for me is staying consistent. This is something I’m personally still working on to this day.

Let me give you a list of example scenarios.

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Examples of Inconsistency in My Life:

1. Eating healthy

I go through the same cycle of eating healthy and eating unhealthy over and over again. It genuinely pisses me off when I realize I’m slipping back into the unhealthy phase, leaving me with my internal self saying, “Oh—shit. Damn it, Yuno.”

2. Keeping up with a constant sleep schedule

This is another thing that makes me say, “Damn it, Yuno.” I go through phases where I have a very legit sleep routine, and then suddenly I find myself sleeping at 2 a.m. again and waking up completely exhausted.

3. Going to the gym

At this point, you can probably imagine me saying that damn-it line to myself again. Going to the gym is one of those things I really struggle to stay consistent with. Roughly every three months, I get a burst of newfound motivation to become a gym rat. That lasts about one month, and after that, I barely work out for the next three months.

4. Socializing

I’d say I’m somewhere between introverted and extroverted but leaning more toward the introvert side. Most socializing leaves me with occasional stressful sighs in the bathroom. That said, most of the time when I hesitate to go out, I end up having a really good time and feeling glad that I went.

I’m pretty social at the beginning of the semester, but once the classwork gets serious, I slowly fade out of socializing and spend most of my time studying for hours with my “pure fuel” (energy drinks, a.k.a. college students’ bestie).

5. New hobbies

I recently bought an electric guitar with the money I made from my part-time job, and it was not cheap. When I saw how dead my bank account was after buying it, I was convinced I’d stick with this new hobby and play every day.

Well… I was wrong lol.

I played consistently for about a week, and after that, I only played here and there. My excuse was, “I don’t want to annoy my roommates,” which honestly sounds pretty reasonable—but I know it’s still just an excuse.

6. Creative projects

When I say creative projects, I’m talking about things like this journal post, publishing podcast episodes, updating my website, and so on. These projects give me an outlet to visualize my ideas and share them with the world, and it’s been an absolutely fun journey.

However, staying consistent with them has been a challenge, especially when I’m balancing schoolwork and my part-time job.

7. Meditation

Another thing I’ll admit I’m pretty inconsistent with—even though I want to be better at it—is daily meditation. I know it’s supposed to be a straightforward task. Like, it seems simple: you just sit down, stay still, and focus on your breathing.

Yet even when a task seems easy, I—and not just me, but a lot of people—still struggle to stay consistent with it.

In the next paragraph, I want to explain why consistency can be difficult even when a task seems simple.

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Why Being Consistent Is So Hard:

With all of the example scenarios listed above, I noticed a pretty straightforward but important pattern: doing something that’s good for you is so FRICKING hard.

It’s ironic how easy it is to be consistent with “bad” habits. Doom-scrolling on reels, sleeping late, and consuming sugary food and drinks? Easy. That’s because these habits give us a dopamine hit that makes us feel good immediately.

The downside? That sense of satisfaction doesn’t really last, which leaves us stuck in a cycle of repeatedly engaging in those habits.

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What Atomic Habits Helped Me Understand:

The book Atomic Habits by James Clear explains this concept through four steps of habit formation:

1. Cue

2. Craving

3. Engaging

4. Reward

These steps helped me understand why it’s easy to stay consistent with “bad” habits and difficult to stay consistent with habits that are good for us. To understand this better, let’s move backward.

 

[Reward]

Let’s compare two habits: eating a nutritious meal vs. eating your favorite fast-food meal. Which one gives you satisfaction more quickly?

Unfortunately, junk food makes us feel better faster, even though nutritious meals help in the long run.

When it comes to the reward step, fast food delivers faster and stronger satisfaction.

⭐️ First “easier-to-be-consistent” point goes to the bad habits. ⭐️ 

[Engaging]

In Atomic Habits, James Clear explains that habits form more easily when they are easier to engage in.

Going to the gym vs. not going to the gym—staying in your pajamas is obviously easier than changing clothes, going to the gym, and actually doing the work/exercising.

⭐️ Another point to the bad habits. ⭐️

[Craving]

The stronger the reward, the stronger the craving. The weaker the reward, the weaker the craving.

Fast food creates stronger cravings than nutritious meals.

⭐️ Another point to the bad habits. ⭐️ 

[Cue]

A cue is the stimulus that leads us to engage in a habit. Because rewards reinforce behavior, our brains remember that satisfaction and become more sensitive to the cues associated with it.

This is why the environment matters so much in habit formation.

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So… Now What?

Reading this book made me realize that my environment was full of cues for the “bad” habits I was trying to get rid of. Snacks in containers, frozen food I could microwave, and food delivery apps made eating unhealthy incredibly easy.

Before I realized it, I gained a few pounds, my skin started breaking out, and my mood swings worsened.

This experience made me realize how universal this struggle is—we often surround ourselves with cues for bad habits and very few cues for good ones.

4 out of 4 points go to the bad habits. No wonder it’s easier to stay consistent with them.

At this point, you might be wondering, “So how the heck do we make good habits easier to stick with?”

As I said, I’m still working on consistency myself… But! Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

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Solution - Applying the Habit Steps:

As discussed earlier, the first step of habit formation is the cue.

In my situation, the new habit I wanted to form was eating nutritious meals in college, despite a busy and stressful schedule, while also breaking my “bad” habit of constantly eating unhealthy food.

So, the first thing I focused on was becoming aware of and changing the cues around me.

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[Step 1: Cue — Changing My Environment]

To do this, I took the following steps to surround myself with better cues:

1.     Got rid of unhealthy food (snacks, candies, highly processed food)

2.     Deleted food delivery apps from my phone

3.     At the grocery store, tried not to buy unnecessary snacks (ice cream is an exception in my world… I just got the small size instead of the big container.

4.     Meal-prepped and froze meals for the upcoming week—making my own microwavable foods that aren’t highly processed and are still accessible when I’m busy.

Out of these four steps, I’d say the most effective ones for me were the second and fourth.

Before I realized I needed to change my diet, I ordered food constantly through delivery apps. It was a waste of money and not good for my health. While it’s pretty straightforward to remove unhealthy food from your fridge or counter, many of us forget that there’s also a huge cue sitting on our phones.

In a world full of convenience, we need to be mindful that some conveniences come with consequences. By deleting food delivery apps, I was able to reduce the cue that told me I could order anything at any time.

I also want to highlight the fourth step I took—meal prepping, because it played a huge role in forming this habit.

I was never a fan of meal prepping because it felt restrictive, like I was forced to eat the same thing for days. But when I was brainstorming during winter break, I realized I needed to make healthy food easy to access.

As I mentioned earlier, eating healthy on a college campus often requires cooking—and cooking takes time and effort, which makes consistency difficult.

By prepping meals for dinner on the weekend, freezing them, and being able to microwave them after a busy day, I created a strong and reliable cue for this habit.

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[Step 2: Craving — Making Healthy Food Attractive]

Once I had that cue, I needed to make eating healthy something I actually craved.

To crave healthy food, it had to taste just as good as unhealthy food. I needed meals that gave me the same sense of satisfaction as fast food.

Being someone who enjoys cooking helped a lot. I already knew the basics, and over time, I became more confident in making meals that actually taste good. Instead of just cooking plain ground beef or chicken breast with salt and pepper, I experimented with different seasonings, sauces, garlic, ginger, and cooking methods.

I tried my best to make meals that didn’t just fill my stomach, but also filled my heart(based on my preferences though lol). Here are some of the meals I made so far:

It's easy to make, and I think it tastes pretty good! loll

I will be posting these recipes under the Neurish section on the BMTP Website.

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[Step 3 & 4: Engaging and Reward]

This naturally led to the third step—engaging (eating)—and finally the fourth step, reward.

The reward connects directly back to craving. I needed the food to taste good, so eating healthy didn’t feel stressful or miserable. I also wanted to avoid viewing healthy eating as something I was doing only for weight loss, because that mindset had been a huge stressor for me in the past and made it difficult to stay consistent.

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Zooming Out:

I focused on eating healthy as my main example, but I truly believe that any habit can be formed and solidified if you follow these steps from Atomic Habits by James Clear:

·       Be mindful of your environment (cues).

·       Make the habit “attractive” - as it’s described in the book - I highly recommend reading this book :) (craving).

·       Engage in the habit.

·       Make it satisfying enough that you would want to do it again (reward).

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Final Reflection:

There are a lot of things in my life that I would like to be consistent with, as I listed earlier. But it’s also important not to rush and not to set unrealistic goals in the pursuit of consistency.

We need to remind ourselves that stressing to do everything perfectly at once—just because we feel we need to change to feel “enough”—is counterproductive. If you want to make changes in your life, take it slow.

Make the changes stick by taking one step at a time, rather than exhausting or hating yourself in the process. Trying to force change often comes with a sense of insecurity. Even if a goal is achieved, that insecurity can creep back, making you constantly feel the need to change more, just to get a fleeting moment of satisfaction—rather than appreciating how far you’ve come, what you have, where you are, and who you get to surround yourself with.

It’s almost impossible to do everything perfectly because the idea of perfection itself is subjective. More simply, we are humans, often uncertain about ourselves and the world around us. I’ve started to see that being too harsh on yourself while chasing a goal only leaves you with stress, judgment, and self-hatred.

Yet, not being able to stay consistent with your promises to yourself can create those same feelings.

What I’m trying to say is this: doing your best to be consistent can help you move toward the goals and results you dream of—but it’s just as important to remember why you’re working hard in the first place. I personally think that most of our motivation is simply rooted in wanting to be happy.

If working toward a goal is making you miserable, you might actually be moving away from it. If you find yourself feeling unhappy, overwhelmed, overstressed, or depressed, your body might be asking you to pause, take a deep breath, ask for help, and be kinder to yourself—so you can feel like you are living your life, not just surviving.