I have ADHD. Didn't know until I was 25, undiagnosed until 27. This makes habit building even harder and it's so so frustrating and demotivating. If you have other issues than motivation and habit building e.g. disorganisation, poor time management, poor impulse control, sleep problems, always fidgeting/jumping between topics and/or poor emotional regulation (not everyone has every symptom) - this may be something worth looking into.
Having said that thanks to this I am now somewhat of an expert on motivation and habit building because I have had to absolutely maximise my own shitty capabilities at it to have any chance of managing any change in my own life :o
So this is what I've learned:
People like what's familiar and well known, we will tend to fall back into patterns unless we have something to make us come out of them. Doing something differently is new and by virtue of that it's hard. You can counteract this:
- By making the old habit harder - e.g. somebody suggested not having junk food in the house.
- By making the new habit easier - e.g. if you're daunted by complicated recipes of "healthy" food, decide to look for and use only those which are very easy and simple. Give yourself permission to use some convenience items if they fit into the plan. I get out of bed quicker by making sure I have a dressing gown and fluffy slippers so I don't feel like I'm losing the warmth of the duvet.
- Make the new habit obvious and/or interrupt the old habit - e.g. place your guitar in a visible spot in the living room, perhaps in the way of the TV remote, reminding you you had decided to practice for 10 minutes before watching TV.
- By making the new habit appealing - e.g. start an exercise which sounds fun. Look up new healthy recipes you're excited to eat.
- By making the old habit less appealing - e.g. use an app or battery saving mode to put your phone into black and white (apparently, this works).
Dopamine is quite important in the motivation game. That's one of the brain chemicals that makes you feel happy. Essentially dopamine is your inner toddler/puppy and you need to give it enough playtime, fun, joy - then it will go to sleep and let you get on with something important and/or boring. But if you don't "feed" this inner toddler enough it will become bored and destructive, making you want to do nothing but act like a spoilt child - eat crap, be lazy, play computer games, and you definitely won't be able to make yourself concentrate on an essay or housework. This is the state where you just keep refreshing facebook even though it's 3am and everyone is asleep. Some mental health issues like depression can result in not enough dopamine, meaning you'll struggle to experience that "joy" from things or receptors which hoover up the dopamine too fast which means you go straight from joy to seeking the next thing. If you're stressed, run down, trying to cope with complicated things all the time, you'll also be low on dopamine as it's constantly getting "used up" trying to cope with all the stress you're under.
Gamification is a marketing technique which hijacks the dopamine system in order to keep you coming back to something - you can use it yourself to build habits, essentially how you do this is to keep chasing tiny, achievable goals, for example, build yourself a reward chart like a child and keep rewarding yourself after every small bit of achievement. It can just be a tick in a chart. That will hit your dopamine receptors and keep you going. There are apps which will help you with this for some tasks.
Routine and patterns are important to us so you can help a new habit by "hooking" it onto something you already do. For example, stay later at work/college to finish some work, rather than trying to do it at home. Place a reminder for something on the bathroom mirror, so you see it when you brush your teeth. I saw a brilliant one for exercise which is to get up and dress immediately in exercise clothing so that you feel stupid if you get changed without doing any exercise.
Hooking onto obligation or external forces you can't change helps too. For example I used to try to get up in time to watch Friends before I left for school. I could not change the TV programming and if I was late, I missed it. Offering to walk somebody's dog regularly will get you out and active. Signing up to a class you have paid for, are expected at and will therefore feel bad if you miss a session is a good way to motivate yourself to go.
We are more motivated by short term happiness than long term gain - this is the marshmallow test in real life but it's very tricky to get over. To improve this, increase the short term reward, remind yourself of your long term goal, bring the long term goal closer (pick a smaller, nearer goal to focus on). Plus the tips in my first paragraph about making the "bad" habit harder to do. Track your progress - this helps hugely in seeing your own progression towards a goal otherwise it always just seems vaguely out there in the future.
Willpower is a bit of a myth - essentially you need to identify the barriers to something - what is it that puts you off, even if it sounds stupid to you? And break those down. And don't expect too much. Then track the change because it really helps with the feedback loop.
HTH :)