You've let a habit slip. Here's how to recover the situation.

Many of us have a pretty good idea of how to look after ourselves, and at times can be good at maintaining habits around, say, diet, exercise and sleep. But life does not always go to plan, and things can slip. However, I've noticed that when this happens, it can lead someone (including me – see below) to take months or even years to 'get back to it'. This newsletter is essentially about how to stop that from happening.

Last summer, we had our house redecorated. I was not doing the decorating, but I was involved throughout. Because the process required me to, for instance, gather the contents each room in its centre and cover with dust sheets, remove an air conditioning unit, sort through 'junk', replace light fittings and electricity sockets, dig up and move a couple of large cacti, make multiple trips (I reckon about 20 all-told) to the tip, along with similarly regular visits to the hardware store to purchase items for DIY jobs that came out of nowhere. While I was at it, I also took it upon myself to overhaul and upgrade the irrigation system in our garden.

I actually enjoy a bit of 'manual labour' and DIY, but the days started early, and by the end of them, I simply couldn't face the formal exercise that I usually take on a daily basis.

 But, here's the thing: even after the work was completed, it took me a full two and a half months to resume my regular exercise regime. Do I have a rational explanation for the extended hiatus? Quite honestly, no, other than the fact that I simply got out of the habit.

More recently, we went as a family to visit the in-laws. Before we left, I had this vague ambition of sticking, more or less, to my normal eating regime. On the drive up, we stopped at a service station, and I felt I made the best food choices I could from what was on offer. But the food wasn't great, and I also had a couple of bites of my daughter's pizza.

When we arrived at our destination, I ate the pasta a family member had prepared for us. Basically, within a few hours of leaving home, all the rules had gone out of the window. The following day, a neighbour presented us with a cake she had baked for our arrival. I ate some of that. And I ate bread at the communal breakfasts (I don't normally eat bread). And, as one 'might as well be hung for sheep as a lamb', I grazed on chocolate left over from Christmas. You get the idea.

In such situations, there's a risk that a weekend of dietary indiscretion can turn into an extended issue, along with (in my case) some unwanted weight gain and feelings of 'I talk about this for a living and really should be better than this.'

Not wanting this to happen, I made a strong commitment to myself to 'stop the rot' as soon as we returned home. So, the morning after getting back late at night, I was straight back into my regular eating pattern. No more bread at breakfast. Actually, no breakfast at all.

The mental tool I used here was to decide in advance when I would get back on track and resume my usual eating habits. This is sometimes called 'pre-commitment', and I've used this tactic repeatedly in my life, for example, during holidays, stag weekends and celebrations.

'Pre-commitment' is the tactic I think I should have used during the redecoration of our house in the summer. Probably all it would have taken was for me to engage my brain and, at some point in the process, commit to resuming exercise as soon as we were done with the redecorating, and I wasn't feeling wrung out at the end of the day.

WHAT WORKS

So that a minor derailment does not become a major disruption in service, commit to a specific time in the not-too-distant future when normal service will resume.

It might help you to bear this in mind should you find a habit has slipped (it happens to almost all of us).