There are habits whose benefits are only obvious once you stop doing them.

When I had a consistent meditation practice, the mental clarity it had brought was my norm. It felt like that's just how I was by default, which caused me to fall out of the habit.

Only when I did it again after falling out, and lost that mental clarity, did I remember how big of a difference it made.

It's similar with exercise, journaling, or even with brushing your teeth. If you do them consistently, you don't realize how important they are, because the benefits they bring become your default state, and it feels like that's just how you are. The mind weakens the association of your new default good state with the activity itself.

One straightforward method is to make the activity immediately rewarding. Toothpaste companies solved this by making their products taste better and leave a fresher feeling in the mouth. This dramatically improved brushing habits, because, in addition to raising people's default overall hygiene, it now made people feel better in that instant.

But this approach can't be applied in all situations. On average, meditation and journaling are not immediately rewarding, not in the way toothpaste leaves a fresh scent. Most days, after meditation, I feel more or less the same, especially if it's part of my daily routine, it just feels like what I do. Same with journaling. Very rarely, or if I haven't done it in a while, journaling feels refreshing, but most times I just feel the same before and after.

Once these become daily habits, they raise your baseline level of happiness, so their rewards are distributed across your life, not tied to the instant you are done with them.

Another important method is to bake them into rituals. To make them part of your routine so ingrained that the mind assumes they are going to happen, and puts up no friction. Rituals are so powerful that every major religion on earth employs some variation of them.

Lastly, the strongest method I've seen is to make them costly. For evolutionary reasons, the mind weighs loss heavier than gain. To the part of our brain that controls our impulses, the immediate pain of losing something now is usually greater than the distributed future gain of elevated baseline happiness. It creates a strong immediate motive to overcome friction, in a way that knowing something is good for you in the abstract sense doesn't.

This is why most people do better work under tight deadlines, especially if there are real consequences for missing the deadline. Most students can attest that some of their best work was done hours or even minutes before a deadline.

For personal habits, I just pay money to my friends if I don't do it. This has worked extremely well for me. In fact, if I don't write this blog post right now, I'll pay my friend. This works only one way, he will not pay me anything if I do it. It's stupid. But that's exactly the point. The pain of losing the money for no good reason is enough of an immediate cost that I am sat down, and typing these words into my computer right now.