Your current habits have strongly established neural pathways. They’re like well-worn trails through the forest – easy to follow, easy to walk.
But if they don’t take you where you want to go, what’s the point of following these paths?
Perhaps you’d like to go somewhere else – a new lifestyle, a better career, a healthier mind and body – but every time you try (or even just think about trying) you feel a massive amount of resistance, so you just keep doing what you’ve been doing.
The reason you feel so much resistance is simply because the behavior is new, and new habits require new neural pathways. Forming a new neural pathway is like bushwhacking through dense underbrush. It’s hard, uncomfortable work. It’s so much easier to just stay on the preexisting trail.
But the bushwhacking only has to happen once. Performing this new behavior only has to be difficult the first time. If you’re strategic, it will quickly get easier.
Blaze a new trail toward your desired destination, and then return to it tomorrow. Repeat the new behavior in the same place, in the same way, at the same time, day after day, and it will become a well-worn path in your mind. Once established, automatic routines are ridiculously easy.
The resistance you feel is not because the habit you’d like to form is terribly difficult to perform. Exercising, reading, meditating – whatever – they’re not that hard. The hard thing is forming a new neural pathway. Once you do that, the habit will be easy.