Building a new health habit is a process that can be filled with excitement and promise. You imagine yourself reaping the benefits of a behaviour you know will improve your well-being—perhaps a daily meditation or yoga practice, or a healthier diet. In the planning stage, you feel highly motivated, purchasing special equipment and books to support your new practice, and shiny new journals to help track your progress.
The challenges almost always follow: kids barge in on your morning meditation, work meetings run late and you miss your evening yoga class, and the new diet recipes are so complicated you give in and order take-out.
Why do the behaviours that help us so often fail to stick in daily life?
Research is clear that most people struggle to stick with positive health behaviours, even though they know the rewards will be significant. In the field of mindfulness, one study found that out of a sample of almost 1,000 people who had been exposed to meditation, fewer than one in four continued to practice daily.
Why do the behaviours that help us so often fail to stick in daily life? This was the question that researcher Eli Susman couldn’t shake, and it led to a decade of research and a new book called Micropractice: A science-backed approach for calm, clarity, and joy in 30 seconds or less.
Susman coined the term “micropractice” to encompass small, powerful training sessions that offer a unique approach to contemplative practices like mindfulness, body movement, and self-compassion. His PhD research showed that self-compassionate touch for 20 seconds a day led to significant improvements in stress and mental health—comparable to other studies that looked at much more time-intensive practices.
“The problem isn’t that long-form practices don’t work,” writes researcher Eli Susman. “It’s that they’re packaged as something that demands more time than many of us can give.”
Consistency Always Wins
“The problem isn’t that long-form practices don’t work,” writes Susman. “It’s that they’re packaged as something that demands more time than many of us can give.” In a modern world of non-stop news cycles, deadlines, and multi-tasking, longer practices also fail to stick because it can be near impossible to summon the energy to do them.
In her therapy practice, Farzana Doctor sees many people, especially those in caregiving professions, go full-steam all day long, only to end up in front of the TV with a bag of popcorn. “It’s not the worst thing in the world,” she says. “However, it’s not restorative.”
Doctor is the author of the book 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life, a self and community workbook for activists, helpers, and caregivers, which is full of short practices designed to bring one’s nervous system back into what she calls the “window of capacity”—a state of calm where we make the behaviour choice we had been planning to make.
While studies that compare different lengths of meditation show mixed results, what is clear is that longer is not necessarily better. One study that analyzed over 280,000 meditation sessions on the app Insight Timer found no significant differences in outcomes across session length, yet consistency of practice was associated with the largest change in mood, equanimity, and resilience.
“The nervous system learns through repetition, not duration,” writes Susman in Micropractice.
Doctor, who has an impressive 689-day streak on Insight Timer, knows firsthand how much consistency can lead to long-term change. As a teacher, all of her guided meditations are under 10 minutes, as she suspects that’s the length people gravitate to when given a choice. “There might also be something with social media and our very short attention spans that people are learning these ‘snacks’ or ‘hacks’ from Instagram and TikTok, and I think that’s good,” she says. “The more information we have on how our nervous system works and how we can be calm, the more we’re all going to be able to live happier lives.”
“The nervous system learns through repetition, not duration,” writes Susman in Micropractice. “It’s consistency that reshapes patterns, not heroic efforts once in a while, but showing up again and again, however you can.”
Acknowledging Your Future Self
Showing up as yourself is not always easy, especially in light of research that reveals how our brains predict our future behaviour. We treat our future selves like different people, which makes it more likely that short-term choices, such as watching TV or scrolling social media, are in conflict with healthier long-term goals.
When it comes to mindfulness, we may imagine ourselves in the future to be more centered, grounded, and better capable of being a person who meditates for long periods of time without interruption. The dissonance between the person we are in this moment and the person we dream of becoming is what psychologists call lower present-future self-continuity, leading to a tendency to underestimate constraints (like time and energy) and assume that we will live in ideal conditions in the future.
Short practices are a way to do something that is not nothing—a few minutes a day, regardless of what life throws at you.
In one study that explored how people estimate their future behavior in blood donation, exercise frequency, and monetary savings, the authors found that standard predictions were very similar to “ideal world” predictions—meaning that people assumed they would behave exactly the same way in a realistic scenario as they would in a life where they weren’t facing any obstacles. The findings showed that the key to stronger present-future self continuity was to have people acknowledge their unrealistic predictions; those who did abandoned their idealistic expectations and embraced realistic ones.
“Micropractice can meet you where you are,” writes Susman. And “where you are” may be imperfect and messy, just as it will be next week or next month. Short practices are a way to do something that is not nothing—a few minutes a day, regardless of what life throws at you. Before you know it, those minutes have added up to hours, and your practice becomes a habit—something your future self will thank you for.
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