Most advice about building a habit assumes you're the problem. Not enough discipline, not enough willpower, not enough want-it-badly-enough. But watch what happens to people's routines when life genuinely gets in the way, and a different picture emerges. The habits that survive aren't the ones held together by grit. They're the ones built well in the first place.
We learned this the hard way, during a heatwave.
When everything slipped
June brought us a brutal stretch of heat. The office turned into a greenhouse by mid-morning, the nights brought no relief, and one by one, the team's routines fell apart.
Arina, who runs most mornings, stopped almost overnight, there's no willpower that survives a 7am start when you've barely slept and it's already too warm to move.
Proper meals became whatever was cold and nearest. The carefully-kept routines of spring quietly collapsed inside a fortnight.
And that's not weakness, it's well documented. When the conditions around a habit change, the habit usually goes with them. Research into disrupted routines has found exactly this: shift someone's context and their established behaviours weaken, because the cues that triggered them have vanished.
But one habit held. And figuring out why taught us more than all the ones that broke.
What actually makes a habit stick
The most-cited modern study on this is Lally et al. (2010) at University College London, which tracked 96 people forming new daily habits over twelve weeks.
Three findings are worth carrying with you:
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It takes longer than you think. The "21 days" rule is a myth. Behaviours took 66 days on average to become automatic, and anywhere from 18 to 254 days depending on the person. If it hasn't clicked yet, that's normal. Keep going.
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Consistency beats intensity. The habits that stuck were repeated in a stable setting, same trigger, same time. Steady repetition builds automaticity; heroic bursts don't.
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One missed day doesn't undo it. Missing a single opportunity had no meaningful effect on the habit forming. The break in the chain isn't what breaks the habit, the story you tell yourself about it is.
Now, the useful part. Here's how our team actually keeps their routines standing, season in, season out.
Five tips from the team
1. Make it the nicest part of your day (Abby)
"I take my collagen over ice. A scoop, cold water, loads of ice, sipped slowly at my desk. In summer it's the best few minutes of the morning, I genuinely look forward to it. That's the whole trick, I think. If a habit feels like a chore, it's the first thing to go the moment you're tired or busy. Make it something you want to do and it stops needing willpower."
The science backs her: habits built around genuine reward are the ones that survive disruption.
2. Change the format, not the habit (Arina)
"When it's roasting, I won't cook myself anything warm, but I still need to hit my protein goals. So I blend mine cold into a nutritious smoothie. In winter I stir the exact same scoop into warm morning oats instead. The habit never changes. Only the form does. That's how it survives the seasons, I bend it to fit the weather instead of quitting when the weather turns."
Adapting a habit to a changed context, rather than abandoning it, is exactly what the disruption research would recommend.
3. Place it next to something that never moves (Ferial)
"My GP has been pretty adamant that I need to keep up with Vitamin D3 every day, but I’m so bad at this. So I put my jar next to my laptop or kettle. Work, coffee and tea happen every day, no matter what's going on, so Vitamin D3 does too. I never have to remember it, because I've tied it to something I'd never skip."
This is textbook: Lally's participants succeeded by anchoring a new behaviour to a rock-steady existing cue.
4. Stack them on (Anna)
"I take my Magnesium right after I brush my teeth every evening. One finished thing flows straight into the next, I'm not relying on memory or motivation, because the habit I already have drags the new one along with it. But hear me out, I started sleeping a lot better since taking it, so it makes a lot of sense. I feel like I’m dozing off the moment I take my Magnesium, it’s so rooted now."
The science: stacking a new behaviour onto an established one borrows the old habit's automaticity.
5. A missed day isn't a blown one (Georgia)
"I used to treat one skipped day like I'd ruined the whole thing, so I'd just… stop. Now I know that's nonsense. Miss a day? Start again the next morning. The streak was never the point, the habit is."
She's right, and the data agrees: a single missed day has no real effect. Quitting after it does.
The takeaway
Disruptions like a heatwave, a house move, a chaotic week, all of these are a stress test for your routines. Most will fail it. And that's genuinely fine, because the ones that fail tell you they were never built to last. The ones that survive share the same DNA: enjoyable, anchored to something steady, low-effort to start, and flexible enough to change shape when life does.
Build a habit like that, and it'll still be there long after the heat (or the cold, or the chaos) has passed.
References
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C., Potts, H., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.