4 Reasons Why Doing A 30-Day 5 AM Wake-Up Challenge Won’t Make The Habit Stick

Everybody who wants to wake up at 5 AM thought about making it a 30-day online challenge to make the habit stick.

Here are some reasons that won’t work, from my own experience of doing a 30-day challenge of waking up at 4:30:

1. You won’t have the online validation past the 30 days. One big help when doing a challenge is that people will cheer you on. This will become the reward for doing the action to form a habit. However, once the 30 days end and nobody cheers you anymore, the question “Why am I doing this?” will pop into your head.
2. You will unconsciously internalize the 30-day duration. This will create anticipation of the 30 days passing. After that, whenever you feel sleepy during the day, you will fantasize about the first day you will sleep in after the challenge.
3. Whenever a hard limit is set on what you cannot do, you will begin to think about doing that once the limit is gone.
4. You will feel obligated to do it. Great habits are associated with good feelings. With a challenge, this lingering feeling of obligation will create negative associations in your brain.
5. As soon as the commitment is not there, you will move away from the action.
6. You will make too many sacrifices for the sake of the challenge. Building habits is not linear; people rarely stick to them 100% percent, which is ok. The sooner you release the pressure of perfection from habit-building, the better.
7. However, during a challenge, you won’t want to disappoint the people watching, and so, you sacrifice time with family, movie nights, and going out with friends. Soon after the challenge, you will think, “This is not worth it”

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