How to Create Healthy Habits When You Feel Like a Failure

Life is a challenge and you feel like you’ve failed yourself. Things need to change but you don’t know how to create healthy habits that will finally stick. Do you find yourself saying, “Why should I keep trying when I’ll just fail again?”. I want you to stop and look at how you are feeling when you say this to yourself.

How does this make you feel?

Why are you beating yourself down?

Would you do this to those you love?

Feel all of these feelings and remember them. As you practice this first method you will start to be more mindful of how you talk to yourself and how that makes you feel. The next step is creating healthy habits to break through the negativity surrounding you.

Before we talk about how to create healthy habits, let’s get real about why you are struggling. There are a few reasons and one or more of these may just ring true for you.

Why You Struggle Creating Healthy Habits

Let’s be honest with ourselves, there are many reasons why we struggle and the reasons may not be the same every day. However, understanding what may be triggering it and why we resort to our default bad habits will help us be more mindful of our reactions and actions.

You haven’t dealt with past events and those thoughts and feelings consume you today.
You believe that failure is inevitable and something to be ashamed about.
Setting goals for yourself doesn’t work, is what you tell yourself.
You put everyone else ahead of yourself, constantly.
You have to control everything, all of the time.

When you are letting past events creep into your internal dialogue, running your life that way on autopilot, you are missing out on your best life. It’s time to deal with that garbage and how it makes you feel so that you can move on, realize that you aren’t a failure for staying this way but you have been fighting to survive instead of thriving within your life.

Well, I’m telling you, dear survivor, it’s time to vote yourself off the island and create a life you love one small step at a time!

Putting others first, always, is natural for those that are hiding and just trying to get by in their day. I get it! I’m a mom of three that worked outside the home. Life became a simple routine where my family came first. This is what I honestly thought needed to be done to be a great mom and wife.

I was wrong though.

One day, I woke up and realized I didn’t love myself. I didn’t like being unhealthy emotionally and physically. Something needed to change and I needed to start putting myself first a little more.

Little by little my goals at work branched into what I call life goals. I even started by learning to let go of the control issues I had. I’ll be honest with you, being a control freak affects your work-life balance so I learned to use that inner control freak to help me let go more.

Now that we have looked at why you are struggling to create healthy habits, let’s look at how to create healthy habits.

How to Create Healthy Habits When You Feel Like a Failure

There are 5 steps to learning how to create healthy habits, even when you feel like a failure.

Know that you aren’t alone.
Start to understand what you are thinking and how it makes you feel – write them down.
Dig deeper into why you feel that way – where does this come from?
Create a Success Plan – set life goals, and break them into small steps.
Track your success plan – track your progress and celebrate the small achievements in creating healthy habits.

Believe me, when I say this, YOU ARE NOT ALONE! There are very few people in this world that haven’t struggled with creating healthy habits at some point in their lives. Why is it so hard to break the chains of bad habits? In a nutshell, our brains crave routine and habits are routines.

The problem arises when we aren’t living our full potential and are slowly killing our spirits or damaging our physical health. This is when we need to take small steps to create a custom routine that will work to shake up the damaging routines or habits we have lived with for so long.

Step 2 is starting to become more mindful of our thoughts and how they make us feel. I want to write them down. Feel them. Own those feelings and know that it is okay to feel them. Then go to step 3 and start looking into where this all started? Where did this come from? You may know the obvious answer. You may not get a clear answer right away. Lots of times the lies we tell ourselves to protect ourselves mask the true reasons. Keep journalling it though, and one day the light bulb will shine bright and you will be able to finally move on.

The key to knowing your feelings and why you are feeling this way is to know where the thoughts are coming from and why they are there. Do you need to stay there? Do you need to continue to feed those thoughts? NO! You can start to change how you react to those thoughts and still feel what you need to feel before you can finally move past letting it define you and hold you back.

Steps 4 and 5 help create a path to focus upon. They will help give you accountability when you need it the most. I’ve created The Ultimate Life Goal Journal and a free 16-page guide to the Ultimate Motivation Hacks for Life Goals, which will help you along this journey.

Final Thoughts That Might Help You

When life isn’t going as planned and you are struggling, staying in that survivor mode isn’t enough. It’s safe, I know. However, it isn’t living the life you deserve. You deserve more!

To start your healthy habits journey, start small with just these simple steps. Book tiny “appointments” with yourself to remind yourself to take care of yourself. They can be reminders to get dressed, wash your face, brush your teeth, or even eat a healthy breakfast. Schedule a walk and if you don’t want to feel alone during this walk, download a podcast or have your favorite music ready to help you.

Don’t squash the little changes you make to your day, because it is the small steps that make the biggest impact in your life. Make these small steps healthy habits that become a natural part of your day and week. Slowly they will replace the old bad habits and you will start to live a healthier lifestyle. I believe in you.