How to Stay Consistent and Stop Giving Up on Your Health Routines
Wondering how to stay consistent with your health goals when nothing seems to stick?
If you restart things every Monday or you're waiting for January 1st to try again, what I'm about to show you is truly going to change your life because it's not about discipline and it’s not that you're lazy.
The reason you keep falling off the wagon and continue to self-sabotage has everything to do with your nervous system. And once you understand that, reaching your health goals gets a whole lot easier!
Staying Consistent Has Nothing to Do With Willpower
I talk to women all the time who say, "Leah, I have tried everything and nothing works." They've done the diets, they have a graveyard of supplements on their counter, they've bought the planners, they've started the routines. And they keep ending up back at square one.
So here's what's actually going on.
Your unconscious mind (the part of your brain running about 90% of your body's functions without you even realizing it) is wired for one thing above everything else. Not success: survival. And to your brain, change feels like a threat.
So when you start eating differently, building a new routine, investing in yourself, or trying to grow, your brain goes: "This is unfamiliar. Abort mission." And that's when the cravings show up out of nowhere. That's when you find yourself mindlessly scrolling instead of doing the thing you said you’d do. That's when the emotional overwhelm hits and the whole plan falls apart.
Your conscious brain wants the results, but your unconscious brain wants familiarity. And familiarity almost always wins, until you learn how to actually work with your nervous system.
Your Symptoms Have Become Your "Known"
I want you to sit with this for a second. You don't love the bloating, the fatigue, the mood swings, the painful periods. But your body knows how to navigate them. They're predictable. They're familiar.
No matter how good it sounds right now, feeling amazing, having consistent energy, waking up clear-headed, all of that is unknown. And your brain treats the unknown as dangerous, even when that unknown thing is actually healing.
This is why you can be completely committed on day one and totally off track by day five. You hit that middle ground somewhere between starting and finishing and your nervous system pulls you right back to what it knows.
We're great at starting, you guys. Starting is not the problem! It's that middle ground where things fall apart. And it's not because you're an all-or-nothing person or because you always quit. It's because your nervous system doesn't feel safe changing yet.
This is the Real Reason You Keep Starting Over on Mondays
A lot of women are trying to build new habits on top of an identity that doesn't support them.
Maybe you’ve had some of these thoughts yourself:
"I'm just an all-or-nothing person."
"I always fall off the wagon."
"I'm not someone who follows through."
Did any of those feel familiar?
If you see yourself as someone who's inconsistent, your brain will find a way to prove that true every single time.
That’s why learning how to stay consistent has nothing to do with needing a better plan. Real change happens when we shift the internal language, the emotional association, and create safety around consistency. Trying harder doesn't work because you're attacking your goals from the top down, you’re waiting for motivation, trying to force discipline, and white-knuckling your way through something you hate.
But change that actually sticks happens from the emotions up. Nervous system regulation, emotional safety, getting into the identity of who you want to become. That's where we start to see the results.
Your Words are Literally Changing Your Body Chemistry
Okay, this one might sound a little out there, but stay with me. There was a study done on people with dissociative identity disorder, and depending on which identity they were in, they had measurably different blood work. Same person. Different thoughts and emotional state. Different body chemistry.
Your thoughts trigger emotions. Your emotions trigger a chemical reaction. That chemical reaction impacts your hormones and everything else in your body.
This is why you cannot hate your body into health.
I know that might be hard to hear, but I mean it.
You might spend ten seconds in the morning on your affirmations:
“I want to feel good.”
“I want to lose the weight.”
“I want to have more energy.”
And then spend the rest of the day thinking:
"I hate eating this way.”
“I'm so frustrated.”
“Why is this so hard?"
The positive affirmations don’t stand a chance against that!
Here's an example that happened at my house literally this week.
Every morning I give my toddler his juice and minerals. If I hand it to him and say "don't spill it," he spills it every single time.
But if I say, "Hold it with two hands so it all gets in your belly," he does it perfectly, even if he's juggling a toy in the other hand.
What we focus on is what we move toward.
That's true for two-year-olds and it's true for us. So we have to start changing the words we say to ourselves daily. The images we bring to mind. The self-talk that's running on repeat. That's how we start getting congruent with where we actually want to go.
Here’s What Happens When You Regulate Your Nervous System
A lot of well-meaning advice gets it wrong. Here you are in full fight-or-flight mode, feeling overwhelmed, activated, ready to throw your to-do list out the window, and someone tells you to just breathe.
That is not going to work. If anything it's going to make you feel even more twitchy.
Nervous system regulation starts with meeting yourself where you are. If you're activated, you need to literally move that energy first.
Jump on a trampoline.
Do jumping jacks.
Punch a pillow.
Scream into a pillow.
Gargle some water.
These work because they physically move the stress energy your body has built up rather than stuffing it back down.
Once you've moved the energy, then you can shift into the calming tools:
A long hug
Legs up the wall
Rubbing your hands together slowly
Intentional breath work
These are beautiful tools, they just need to come after you've discharged the activation first.
And then, from that calm and regulated place, ask yourself this: "What would the version of me who has already reached this goal do right now?"
Not what should I do. Not what do I feel like doing. What would she do? That question is exactly how we start to rewire the patterns and build consistency from the inside out.
You Don't Actually Have a Consistency Problem
If you've been struggling to figure out how to stay consistent, it is not a character flaw. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep you safe by keeping things familiar. Your job is to gently, consistently teach it that change is safe.
That looks like moving your body when you feel activated instead of numbing out.
It looks like paying attention to the words you use about yourself and your goals every single day.
It looks like asking "what would she do" instead of waiting for motivation to show up on its own.
If you want support working through this at a deeper level, that's exactly what we do inside the Hormone Reset Program®. We work on the nervous system piece alongside your hormones, your labs, and your personalized protocol because a body stuck in fight-or-flight cannot balance hormones no matter how clean you eat or how many supplements you take. It all has to be addressed together.
Stop Starting Over on Mondays!
If you're ready to stop starting over on Mondays and actually get to the root of what's going on in your body, click below to learn more about the Hormone Reset Program® and what it looks like to work together.
