Two-Day Rule

Habits are hard to form. A new habit requires a commitment to change. A new habit requires deliberate effort and attention to detail. Without focus, any attempt to start a new habit will soon fall away after initial motivation wanes off. There are many ways to track habits to ensure you are personally accountable for the change you want to instill in your life. Spreadsheets and marking them off on calendars are visible ways to track progress. Making goals and habits visible are great ways to hold yourself personally accountable. You can also choose to vocalize the goals to those around you. Having others around can help you stick to your plans. But one of the most effective perspectives to have is adopting the “Two-Day Rule.”

The Two-Day Rule helps negate the need to go “all-in” on a new habit. Going all-in on a new habit is not a sustainable practice. If you sleep in until 8:30 AM and want to start getting up at 5:30 AM, you cannot expect to be one hundred percent perfect immediately. There will be days when you fail. If you want to become a runner, you will not start off running every day. Some days you will take the day off. Going all-in on new habits requires motivation to sustain fully and that is not a reality.

The Two-Day Rule is a personal commitment to not fail two days in a row. The Two-Day Rule is effective for new habits because it gives you a buffer zone. It gives you a chance to not be perfect without giving up completely. It gives you one day to recover, slack off, and fall back to your original patterns of life. But once that day is up, you are back to work. The Two-Day Rule is important to stick to because people have a tendency to let repeated failures derail them completely. If you miss one day of running that is fine, you can do it tomorrow. Miss two days and you will frequently see those two days missed turn into a week missed. That week missed then turns into a month missed and the “new” habit is completely out of sight and out of mind.

The Two-Day Rule is a constant reminder that you have to act if you did not act the day before. It is a reminder that you do not need to be perfect to form a new habit, you just need to be conscious and deliberate with your actions. The Two-Day Rule is a realistic and possible option for starting new habits. It is in the realistic and possible nature that the new habit will end up sticking to your lifestyle. The Two-Day Rule is a viable perspective for making lasting changes in your life.