Fail-Proof Habits for 2026
===
[00:00:00] Today we're gonna talk about why willpower doesn't work, and you'll walk away with some practical tips that you can use right away if you choose to, to make 2026 the year that you're not relying on willpower anymore, you're taking these alternative routes that kind of work a little bit better.
Have you ever tried to build a new habit, like. Only to give up after a week.
Most of us think that all we need to do is try harder to get more motivated, right? We'll finally break our bad habits or start good ones. But let's be honest, motivation fades and willpower goes right out the door alongside with it.
And if this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
Welcome to another episode of the Creative Life in Motion Podcast, where we don't wait until we reach our goals to be happy. We fall in love with who we are being along the way. I'm your host, Karen Wilson,
science shows us that we only [00:01:00] have like a set amount of willpower in us per day, every time something comes in front of us, we have to make a decision whether we're going to interact with it, whether we're gonna ignore it, what we're, you know, how we're gonna do it with it. And every single time one of those things comes across our plate and we have to decide.
It hacks away at our willpower because of the fatigue. Now, let's face it, if you're tired, are you going to have the motivation? Are you going to have the motivation or the willpower to get yourself out of that state and do something, the thing that you said that you were gonna do, that you're not doing because you're, you're lacking willpower and motivation.
We have to be honest about this. There are so many distractions out there. You know, like we didn't have this 30 years ago where [00:02:00] we're constantly connected to our phone, constantly connected to our devices. We used to like just go to work and come home and be disconnected from work. Now we're connected a hundred percent of the time if we want to be.
Our brains weren't meant to hold all that capacity,
Have you ever noticed that? Sometimes you'll have a day where you are completely fatigued at the end of the day, but you did nothing physical. It was all brain work, and maybe it was. Like a deep dive on the internet. Maybe you were recording videos, answering social media messages, um, then maybe watching some YouTube videos later on, and you're just so tired that you could just fall asleep on the couch.
Your body aches and you're sore. That my friend, is decision fatigue. It's too much stimulation and it's impossible [00:03:00] to have willpower or motivation with that. You know, it's all you wanna do is go to sleep and your body probably needs a sleep. Think about the New Year's resolutions, right?
The first week of it, oh gosh. I kind of have grown to despise new year resolutions, but I still make them anyway. I still like to do something to improve myself every year. It's, it's kind of like human nature. I think. I just. Grew up doing that. I don't know what, what do you think about resolutions, but maybe a resolution, like for example's sake, is to wake up early and so for the first few days you feel excited about it.
You are jumping up at the sound of the new alarm that's set an hour and a half earlier so that you could crush out all those to-do items that you wanna do to better your routine. And by the third day. That [00:04:00] snooze is starting to go on the alarm, and then there's a new habit forming of hitting the snooze button, and then slowly but surely you just go back to the old way of what your body knows to do, and that's just to not get up early and your old routine is back, the one that's not getting you towards the goals that you want.
Maybe you vow that you are going to eat healthy, but then you have a day where you know, you get up and you're working all day long, and then everything starts to flood in and before you know it, it's time for dinner. You haven't eaten all day, and you end up ordering takeout because you're starving and you say, well.
It just happened once, but then that starts happening again and again and again, and you're back in your old routine. I'm wondering why you don't have the willpower to do it.
You are not failing because you're lazy [00:05:00] or because you can't do it, you're not succeeding because your willpower is not enough.
So what does work? The answer is smart routines, systems, and environment. Now, before you say, oh my gosh, that sounds like a lot. It's, it's really not. We're going to. Talk about a few little things. I, and by all means, I'm not perfect. I'm sharing with you today the things that I have implemented in my life to get big things done that I never thought I could get done because I lack the willpower and the motivation.
So let's look at a couple of things. Okay? Let's not depend on force. Splits depend on the design, the design of how we're going to curate. These pockets of great environment and systems so that you don't have to think about it. So it just deletes the decision fatigue and it becomes automatic, becomes a habit, [00:06:00] and then it becomes a person that you are being.
It, it, it just becomes a part of your being, something you crave. If that sounds impossible, keep listening. Let's look at how tech can give us the upper hand. Now, like I, you know, it does have a negative effect if you're consistently glued to your tech, of course. But there are some systems that you can like.
Take hold of, and use technology to your advantage if you want to
there are a lot of health apps out there now, like way too many of them, but maybe it's time to incorporate something like a smart ring, you know, where you can look at the data, where you can actually understand all the elements of what's going on in your health and get the backstory. For example, if your.
Struggling with sleep. How do you [00:07:00] expect to ever have willpower? Then maybe the only thing that you should be working on is having a better sleep. And the best way to ma measure that is is a fitness tracker or an a sleep tracker, right? Like. Think about the one thing that's going to move the needle for the motivation.
Trying to do too much is a recipe for burnout. So it's just, it's just one thing.
I wanna dive a little bit deeper, into the environment part, because I think it's really, really the biggest game changer that you can take with you into 2026 is setting up the space if you haven't already, I would love it if you read Willpower Doesn't Work. This has been, uh, by Benjamin Hardy.
This is a book I read back in, I believe it was 2020, and it just like, bang. It was like an aha [00:08:00] moment. He goes deep into a lot of different things in here about willpower, but the one that spoke to me the most was in environment, and I sat in my back and I reflected on all the times that I, I feel like I put myself in an environment of success.
So one of those times was. Uh, when, you know, when, when the kids were little and I would have to go get up and, and do my exercise first thing in the morning, and I was training for a half marathon and I always felt really, really bad because I would get, I'd have to go to work for 8:00 AM and I felt bad that I had to get up so early to get my run in.
That, uh, I'd wake up everybody up in the house. So I got into this habit of, of sleeping in the clothes that I was gonna run in the next morning, like when I had to work the early [00:09:00] mornings. You might be asking, well, why didn't you run after work? Because I kept not doing that. I tried to do that.
So instead of continuing to fail, uh, because I was too tired by the end of the day to go for a good quality run or even to want to run, and I also felt guilty that I should be at home making dinner for the kids that were coming home from school, and all of that stuff, all of that was holding me back from having continual success.
So I thought, well, it's a better way to create the, an environment of success to sleep in my, in my runway. And don't worry, it was clean and then get up and, and leave and uh, you know, nobody would know I was leaving. You know, I was nice and quiet. I wasn't rummaging around and I wasn't trying to pro force myself to do it.
At the end of the day, what happened was more continuous success. I put myself in the environment. Another example that I [00:10:00] had was the opposite. So, uh, of quitting something, I wanted to quit smoking and I had set a date. I'm gonna quit cold Turkey. So this, this would be, um, releasing a habit that no longer serves me.
Right? So this is the other set of the scale. You also need to create an environment. For that success. So I thought when I first quit smoking that I was gonna be able to just sleep it off. Well, it didn't work that way. Instead, I got very anxious, like a hamster running in a wheel, and I couldn't sleep. So I, I would go to the gym, a non-smoking environment, and I would walk or run on the treadmill, and then I would go to the mall.
A non-smoking environment and I would wander around if I wasn't working. Work was the hardest place to be because there were other smokers there, so I would just. [00:11:00] Isolate myself and put myself away from the environment of where I felt my weakest. And it took me months to be able to get out of that shell.
Eventually I had a job where, you know, there was no, I wasn't I in contact with smokers. Uh, it took me actually about six months to even step into an adult establishment because I knew I might smell. Smoke and you know, you just, you just put yourself in those areas so that you can succeed. I didn't realize that that's what I was doing at the time.
I was doing it as a survival tactic because I'm a little bit stubborn and I thought, well, if I decided to become a smoker, then I could decide to become a non-smoker, and I'm not going to let my. Body [00:12:00] tell my brain what I wanted to do because my, it was basically my body's. Releasing the addiction, and so I did it cold Turkey.
It was hard, but it was also the best decision of my life, and that was over 20 years ago. I haven't touched a cigarette since. And the reason why I haven't touched a cigarette since is if I have one smoke, I'll be a smoker again, and I know that about myself. So use the clues that you know about yourself to set up an environment for success.
For yourself and what does that look like for you?
Another thing that I find that has a, been a really helpful, uh, willpower provider for me, if you will, has been. Stacking a new habit with something that I already do. I used this tactic, uh, in 2021. I had attempted to write a book quite a few [00:13:00] times in my adult life, and I finally decided like, this is the time that I'm going to write the book.
I have to write the book, and I'm just gonna sit down every day and I'm going to write at the same time. Now, you might think that I, you know, I did absolutely nothing else. But that wasn't the case. I had a job to do. I had a life to run. I had a dog to look after a husband, you know, all these other things.
So how am I going to fit it in? I decided that instead of going directly to social media, the first thing I did in the morning was I. My coffee with me. I walked into my office, I turned on some music, and I did the same thing every single day. And within 90 days I had the book written, edited and published, self-published on Amazon, and I usually spent about [00:14:00] 30 to 90 minutes per day, depending on my schedule, but.
That's, it was, it was a stack. Alright. The coffee in hand was the trigger, and I'd also have my bottle of water, and so was the music when I was done that I would go for a walk. And as I was out walking with my dog, usually I'd get all of these new ideas or ideas that would, um, stack onto what I had written, that I could sit there and I could voice note, not sit there, but walk there and voice note, uh, so that I'd have this continuum on the creation that I was making.
That was a great habit. If you don't have a book on your vision board or your goal list this year, another example of this would be after I brush in the my teeth in the morning, I'll meditate for two minutes, and you put [00:15:00] those two together, right?
And so it's after this, I'll do that. And that's a system that's going to start to lock in this trigger of your brain instead of relying on willpower. You are relying on the repetition, the feeling, the habit formation, the feel good. You have to make sure that you give yourself rewards for doing that.
Maybe sometimes the rewards are the, an oxymoron to what it is that you're trying to do. So maybe you're trying to. Um, be, you know, not go to social media first thing in the morning. Maybe you're trying to just like feed your yourself first so brush your teeth, meditate, and then check social media.
It'd be bonus points if you didn't check social media until after, eight or nine o'clock in the morning or even longer, maybe go a day or two without checking social media. Would that be [00:16:00] nice and quiet? Would that be different? Would that be hard? Maybe that's a question you might wanna ask yourself.
Is that something that I could do to create more space in my life so that I don't have decision fatigue from just the input of everything? Huh. Something to ponder on. Right? Something to think about.
You have to recognize when you hit your goal, you have to recognize and celebrate with something so that your willpower in your motivation is getting rewarded because. A lot of times when we're doing things to, um, better ourselves, to make us better humans and in, in our, our eyesight or maybe for the world, nobody really sees what we're doing when we're alone.
Nobody sees the quiet. Work that we're getting done when [00:17:00] we're trying to improve ourselves. So nobody's gonna come and pat you on the back and say, job well done. I, if you ever notice, like, you know, if you, if you think back to, to being in school and you handed in your homework, your teacher was always rewarding you.
So for that, right? Or maybe not. Hopefully you had a teacher that rewarded you for handing in homework and maybe you didn't hand in homework. I don't know. It's just an example. But you get that reward, you get the, you know, thank you. The, the excitement, which is why a lot of us turn into people pleasing as adults is we, we like to feel like we're giving, we like to feel that reward, that recognition.
We want to be seen as humans. So you have to do that yourself. Think about a goal. Think about what you're going to do to get there. If I refer back to my quitting smoking story. [00:18:00] I, the reward I was giving myself every week for weeks was every single dollar that I saved, I would be spending in the mall on like new clothes, new things.
I was consistently rewarding myself. And then that kind of. Stopped because I didn't need it so much anymore. And my husband and I, we saved money to to put a down payment on a house. So that was a pretty big reward.
But recognizing it and giving yourself a reward will also trigger the dopamine effect, happy chemical. It's gonna build the habit into a habit because you're being rewarded for it, and then it becomes part of who you are being.
Remember, willpower runs out, motivation runs out, but systems setting up your environment for success, whatever that looks like for you. It works and [00:19:00] everyone is individual. So you have to ask yourself the hard questions. What am I doing? What am I not doing? How can I set myself up for success? Uh, and it doesn't have to be big, it's just like one thing.
'cause you're probably doing all the things anyway. In two weeks. I have a guest on the show that's gonna talk a a lot more. We're gonna do a deep dive into environment and that's a really interesting conversation.
I'm looking forward to hearing what you think of as you lean in. What's one thing that, one routine that you're going to make fail proof this year.
And if you were like, really want more of this stuff, I'm actually doing a series right now on my YouTube channel. I just released the, the first video yesterday, depending on again, when you land here. So I'll make sure that you have access to that in wherever you're listening to this podcast in the, um, description box below.
And you can join me as I walk you through [00:20:00] basically my goal system set up. But it's, it's not, it's not the traditional way. It's, it's all about, um, making it simpler so that you can actually, uh, achieve what you wanna achieve. Be happy, look in the mirror, and be proud of yourself instead of over stacking everything and feeling like, you know every.
Time you start, it just doesn't work out. It doesn't have to be that way. I think we can simplify it and get further faster. Um, that's what the Creative Life in Motion is all about. And thank you for hanging out with me here again today, and I will see you next time. Bye.
