“My motivation to lead a healthy life is at an all-time low”

During this past year, I have lost my lifelong good health habits. I used to swim regularly, which stopped with Covid. I used to meditate and do yoga most days at home but, somehow, these routines have fallen away and I can’t summon the will to start again. I now spend hours achieving nothing at all. What can I do to change this? Name supplied

AWe all struggled to keep up our old routines when we lost the framework that kept us on track, so the first thing is to stop telling yourself that this is somehow a failure of willpower.

I love this quote from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits (Cornerstone, £16.99): ‘Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour.’ I also really like his four rules for behaviour change: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying. He uses the word atomic to remind us that tiny things are the building blocks for everything else.

For instance, to rediscover your yoga, you could create an obvious environmental cue, such as laying out your yoga mat before you go to bed. To make it attractive, you might ask a friend to either practise with you, or praise you afterwards. To make it easy, try just two minutes to start with, perhaps lying on the mat in relaxation

– in other words, establish the habit before you try to improve it. The satisfaction might be that you have your first coffee of the day afterwards, or create your own visual star chart.

It might also be that you start from the other end, by removing some of the temptation to do whatever is filling that nothing time (I suspect that it’s a screen of some sort). I find it powerful to set a kitchen timer and say to myself: ‘I’m going to do X for 20 minutes now’ – in all honesty, it’s how I get myself to write!

You are a person who loves swimming, yoga and meditation, and a global pandemic has not fundamentally changed that about you.

jamesclear.com/atomic-habits