Gretchen Rubin Quotes

Twenty-eight days is what is takes to break a habit and to implement a new set of habits.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

If I'm exhausted and I just don't feel like it, then I don't do it. I am a human being, after all. But I also know I'm the kind of person who, if I take one day off, well, it's very easy for me to take the next day off and then quit exercising.

Staying consistent with positive habits can be a challenge.

The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it.

In 'Before and After,' I identify the sixteen strategies that we can use to make or break our habits. Some are quite familiar, such as 'Monitoring,' 'Scheduling,' and 'Convenience.' Some took me a lot of effort to identify, such as 'Thinking,' 'Identity,' and 'Clarity.'

You can't suddenly say, 'I want a brand new habit tomorrow,' and expect it to be easy and effortless.

I don't have a lot of discipline.

To become the kind of person you want to become, you've got to have discipline. It's easier to keep to your standards 100 percent of the time versus 98 percent of the time.

January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

I kind of peak at how far I can push my body, and then I run out of determination for the habit and start easing off. It's really just a lack of focus and discipline.

It is extremely hard to break bad habits and takes a long time to start new, healthy ones.

The problem with resolutions is they're only as solid as the person making them.

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

Most people don't have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.

If you once turn on your side after the hour at which you ought to rise, it is all over. Bolt up at once.

Your desired behavior must become just as much a habit as your undesired behavior was before.

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.

Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not.

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

We can use decision-making to choose the habits we want to form, use willpower to get the habit started, then - and this is the best part - we can allow the extraordinary power of habit to take over. At that point, we're free from the need to decide and the need to use willpower.

If you want to cultivate a habit, do it without any reservation, till it is firmly established. Until it is so confirmed, until it becomes a part of your character, let there be no exception, no relaxation of effort.

I would step into a place of being lined up with a sense of purpose and my inner compass, and everything was going in the same direction. Then I'd get lazy and get off the track. And then things would start to fall apart, and I'd back up and get it together again.

I have a bad history with resolutions! I don't think I have kept up even one of them so far. Once, I promised to myself that I would wake up at 6 A.M. every day - it didn't even last for a week.

It's really hard to be consistent, and you have to know your body and know yourself.