A Former Self-Loather’s Guide to Actually Building Habits

How I Started Accepting Small Wins

If you judge me by my productivity, you’ll conclude that I peaked in middle school. During seventh and eighth grade, I got gold medals at the Asian kid Olympics: I was hardworking, smart, and thin, all while still having fun. Sure, every once in a while, I’d break down and cry for a week straight, but overall, I was a productive machine back then and able to do it all.

Let me be clear here, I’m not exaggerating. Every day after school, I did two hours of competition math practice, practiced flute for an hour, and then did one hour of extreme cardio workouts on YouTube, all before dinner time. Then after dinner, I did my school homework, and concluded with a night-time dessert of fruit. 

Yes, dessert for me was fruit. That’s how disciplined I was back then. At the end of a long day, I relaxed by eating clementines. And I had time to read a book for fun every other day and post frequent book reviews on my blog.

High school and college were not as idyllic.  My classes were extremely difficult, and I felt that getting a B was unacceptable, so I spent much more time on my homework, leaving little time for competition math. I was lucky to get in an hour of math per day. Looking back now, a daily hour of focused math practice would’ve been more than enough to maintain my stone cold killer quantitative instincts, but I started experiencing extreme emotional damage and therefore couldn’t focus. 

For the last decade, every goal I’ve had has been coupled with a debilitating pressure to do well. On the competition math front, I felt scared of my classmates who did so much better than me, so practicing competition math felt extremely painful. I quit flute the first week of high school. I had just gotten braces, which messed up my tone, and other flutists were much more talented than me. I started gorging on actual desserts, gained some weight and became chubby. And for the final kicker, I struggled to write consistently after middle school, which is still something I struggle with today.

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Hi, my name is Valerie, and I peaked at age 13. 

What’s it like to know that I peaked in middle school? To be honest, kind of terrible. I feel like an undisciplined little hobgoblin compared to the version of myself from over a decade ago. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gotten some fantastic wins in the past few years, but there are still some nights when I think about myself at my most disciplined stretches, think about how far I’ve fallen since then, and feel utterly demoralized.

Of course, there’s a lot more complexity to the story. Over the past few years, as I’ve confronted my former-perfect-kid narratives head-on, I’ve begun to see how misguided my default narratives are.

For starters, although I’d love to be smarter, harder working, and thinner, I also see I slip mega-doses of self-bullying into my thoughts. I never think, it would be so great if I could keep up a consistent writing habit. It’s always, if you want to be remotely successful, you need to write consistently, and it’s so pathetic that you struggle with this. And it’s never, I am so proud that I’m not extremely depressed like 2.5 years ago and can function like a normal adult now. Wow, I’ve improved so much! It’s always, okay, why can’t you just snap back to when you were thirteen?

After middle school, I was fixated on snapping “back” or getting “out” of my current situation. I had delusions of an idyllic disciplined past and would try my best to return there, only to torture myself when I failed. Whenever I overate, failed to focus, or struggled with tasks I used to find difficult, I’d think about myself in the past and then get extremely frustrated. 

This self-loathing took a large toll on me. Towards the end of college, I spent many months extremely depressed. If I struggled with focus and motivation before, I really struggled now. Even getting out of bed sometimes took a few hours and the encouragement of multiple friends. Needless to say, most of my habits fell to the wayside. I’ve struggled with habit formation in the years since.

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For the past few months, I’ve been writing almost every weekend and meditating for thirty minutes almost every day. It’s not close to the militant discipline I had at age thirteen, and I’m not as disciplined as I’d like to eventually be, but I’m finally learning consistent self-improvement without self-imposed brutality. This is so monumental for me. 

I’ve spent so much of my life struggling with even the smallest of habits because of negative self-talk. I’m so tired of it, and I wanted to share what’s been working for me, in case it helps you as well. 

Here’s what I know so far about achieving long-term change: one small win at a time. Start small, and treat every time you show up as a huge win. Part of why I struggled so deeply with habit maintenance, be it dental hygiene or meditating consistently, is that, deep down inside, I scoffed at small wins. Small win? That’s just a cope for people who don’t know how to have big wins, I’d say as justification for rounding small wins down to zero. 

For the past few years, many people in my life kept telling me to start small and build up from there. But I could never take it seriously because committing to small wins would require actually internalizing that I wasn’t capable of large wins, and that there is no alternate reality where I suddenly become disciplined and can work for ten hours straight anymore. Accepting that I’m not my thirteen-year-old self anymore, and that I truly do struggle with self-trust on the productivity front, has been extremely hard but rewarding work. 

There is no way “back,” and there is no way “out”. There is only “now”, only “What can I do today?” and “Given my current abilities, not what I used to be able to do, how can I get a small win?” No more “If I work extra hard, I’ll finally be as good as I used to be,” only “every extra weekend I write, or every extra day I meditate, is another reason to trust in myself today.” 

That’s not to say there are no lows. Just last night I called a friend because I felt hopeless and worried that I would never improve. But today, after a good night’s sleep and meditating in the morning, I feel happy and hopeful. When I’m in the thick of my negative emotions, I can’t see how much I’ve developed or how much hope there is around me. But right now, feeling at peace with the many small wins I’ve gotten,  I feel so damn proud of myself.

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Thanks to my friends Sean, Eshan, Domenico, and Alex for reading this essay and providing helpful suggestions. And thank you for reading! Let me know your thoughts in the comments below or DM me on Twitter.

If you enjoyed this essay, check out two related essays: The Most Psychedelic Experience I’ve Had While Stone Cold Sober and How to Be an Insecure Asian in STEM.