Streaks are useful for keeping a behavior going. When you’re on a streak, the momentum and fear of breaking the streak carries you through to repeating a behavior. If you’ve worked out three times a week for 100 weeks straight, you want to do the same next week to keep the streak going.

But what if you manage to only work out twice, or once? Or you get injured while you’re playing a sport, and you don’t get to work out at all? 

Once you miss a behavior in a given time interval the streak is considered broken. Now you have worked out three times a week for 0 weeks straight. It feels painful. It makes you want to give up. There’s a related phenomenon in psychology known as the What the Hell effect.

There are a lot of opportunities that come up in life, and a lot of chaos as well. That makes interruptions difficult to avoid.

Because streaks cause you to develop a fear or resistance to an interruption, they are very fragile.

Instead, consider redefining how you approach consistency. Maybe a more flexible approach would be more helpful. One that’s more forgiving, and more aligned with helping you remember why you want to practice a behavior in the first place.

Maybe instead of, “I’m working out to keep my streak going,” maybe remembering, “I’m working out because I want to feel stronger, because I want to be able to build a bookshelf,” might be more useful.

Practices are also personal. Practice accommodates what life needs from you. The more you learn, and the more that happens to you, the further your practice evolves. That’s what makes them antifragile; a practice can take on new shape, and inject new energy into your life. Where external accountability drives streaks, intrinsic motivation drives practice.

For sure, I would have given up on writing every day by now if I didn’t forgive myself for being late every so often.