If You Can’t Keep a Habit, Read This

If you’ve ever felt frustrated by your inability to stick to a habit, it’s not because you’re lazy.

In my work as an esthetician, I specialize in facial massage both in the treatment room and also through workshops I teach online. The number one response I hear from clients and students who want to incorporate facial massage into their daily life as a habit is that they just can’t seem to stick to it. Life gets in the way.

For most of my adult life I have approached habits like many of us do, as systems to manage myself.

I’ve found myself in this-kind of fucked up thought pattern, that if I just found the right routine, I’d finally unlock some higher functioning and better version of myself. That white knuckling and sticking to these daily habits would finally fix everything. This dominant view of daily habits that has taken over social media feeds is shaped by a transhumanist mindset. It treats the body like a machine where the goal is maximum efficiency at all costs. In that model, habits are tools for control.

But this framework doesn’t work very well with our human nature.

We aren’t machines. We’re cyclical, emotional, spiritual beings who need meaning. When a habit isn’t rooted in connection, it slips away because it’s out of alignment.

My mind was blown when I was introduced to the idea of habit as a devotion to your life purpose.

I was in a program hosted by my friend Margaret James, who teaches about habits through the lens of Ayurveda. I had already known of Ayurveda as a system with beautiful daily rituals like tongue scraping, oil pulling, and body oiling. But I had never paused to ask why those rituals mattered. I thought of them as cute and charming add ons to your wellness journey, but nothing more than that. I later realized, nothing is just an add-on, everything we do matters. Even the smallest actions accumulate meaning over time. What I had dismissed as trivial are actually daily micro votes that shape my reality.

Every habit is a form of devotion whether you realize it or not.

The question is: what are you devoting yourself to? Are your daily choices bringing you closer to the life you say you want? Or are they unconsciously reinforcing patterns that pull you away from that?

In yogic philosophy, there’s a teaching about this. Your sankalpa is your soul’s intention. Your vikalpa is the belief or fear that keeps you from living it.

Much of what you do is a habit, even if it doesn’t feel like one. When your actions support your sankalpa, they become small and steady votes for deeper soul alignment. When they serve your vikalpa, they can become an insidious way of staying stuck. Insidious because you may not even consciously realize it!

This is where discipline comes in.

I don’t believe discipline is the opposite of devotion. I think it’s what helps devotion take shape as you return to your habits day after day. Discipline, in this context, feels less like control and more like embodied devotion. Consistency that you are choosing to show up for because it feels good more often than not. If you’ve been struggling to “get it together” with your habits, it might not be that you need to strong arm yourself with more willpower. You might have more success by simply tweaking your mindset around them.

If the habit itself isn’t rooted in something meaningful, no amount of structure will make it last. Anchor it in purpose, and you’ll want to return to it.

If this piques your interest, you will love my 6 week facial massage workshop that I teach twice a year! We talk about how to actually devote to the habit of self care. Click here to sign up for the waitlist.