A trick that’s helped me stay consistent with my daily habits is to lower the initial resistance required for a given activity. What that means is to spend time setting yourself up for success, so that when it’s time to do whatever habit you’ve planned, you’ve made it as easy as possible for yourself.

Initial resistance is all in your head. It’s the roadblocks to action that your mind puts up – the excuses that you create for yourself. For example, if I have a project to do for a class, maybe the initial resistance is my mind telling me that it’s so much work and I should just wait to start it. Or if I’m trying to eat healthier, the initial resistance could be me thinking of how much effort it would take to cook and choosing to order fast food instead. It’s these initial resistances that you should target when trying to start a new habit. From my experience, once I get over the initial resistance, the task is always easier than I had imagined.

There lies the key to overcoming the initial resistance and building good habits. You want to utilize proper preparation to make it as easy as possible to start the activity, so your brain can’t create a good excuse for inaction. I’ll give a few examples from my own life of what this looks like in practice:

1. Going to the gym at 5:00 am every day.

I lower the initial resistance by updating my spreadsheet each night prior so that I know exactly what exercises I’ve got lined up for the next day. I prepare my workout clothes and have a morning routine lined up so that when I wake up, all I don’t have to think about anything – I just follow the process I’ve already set up.

2. Doing laundry.

I sort my laundry the night before my weekly “laundry day” Sunday. This way, when I wake up on Sunday, I can immediately load up the washer without having to grumble about sorting the clothes and taking up so much time doing laundry. I make it so I can’t build up the task to be overwhelming in my head – laundry is now simply tossing my clothes into the machine.

3. Eating healthy.

I meal prep my week’s lunches and snacks on Sunday so that when I’m scrambling to get ready for school on a weekday morning, I don’t have to worry about what to bring.

4. Working on a big school project.

I lower the initial resistance by taking just a few minutes to quickly outline the steps I want to approach the project from. By doing this, I’ve broken the large task into smaller, manageable parts. Each part doesn’t seem so intimidating now, and I find it much easier to get to work on a small part than to imagine working on an entire project in one sitting.