How to Make an Exercise Habit that Lasts (with steps)

You’ve probably been told more than enough times in your life that exercise is good for your mental health. And there are more than enough scientific studies that will support that claim. But let's be honest: It’s 2025 and most of us lead a sedentary lifestyle. Introducing exercise can be a challenge. Especially for those of us that have never really had a habit of exercising before. Anxiety, depression, chronic pain, weight, and medical needs or injuries can stand in the way of us making needed progress. The number of videos and information online can overwhelm us and set us up with goals that are unrealistic and unattainable. But this doesn’t have to stop us from feeling our best. This article can help you create an exercise habit that lasts, so you can reap the benefits.

First things first:

Focus on building a habit and not on what you can achieve through that habit. Your main motivation for exercise might be wanting to lose weight, to improve your mental health, or increase mobility, which are great. But having your focus on the outcome of your exercise can be demotivating.

For example, if my focus is on fitting into size 4 jeans, it will be a long time before I get there. Having my focus on the size of my body that changes very slowly is not going to encourage me to keep going. I might even give up before I start.

But if I shift my focus to creating a habit, I can make significant progress every single day, which feels fast and is more encouraging. While fitting into a size 4 may be important to me, it isn’t truly what matters most when I really sit down and think about it. The habit of exercise itself is more closely aligned with what is most important to me, which is being healthy overall.

Use these steps to begin:

Step 1: Assess your current self and decide a reasonable place to start. Ask yourself some important questions:

What exercise level am I currently at?

What is my mobility?

Where am I most comfortable getting out of my comfort zone?

If I am being honest with myself, what will I reasonably do?

Then, pick an exercise.

Find an exercise that meets your interests, mobility, and comfort zone. Most likely this will be walking, yoga, sitting chair routines or other low stress and adaptable exercises.

Remember that time you randomly decided to do a High Intensity Workout on YouTube and then never did one again? Me too.

You don’t want to pick something challenging to start, because you won’t have the tolerance built up to stay motivated. The discomfort of the activity will discourage you and it will be more likely that you give it up.

Be honest with yourself. Even if you feel people of your age and fitness should be able to do the exercise, ask yourself if you are ready mentally or physically to do it.

You’ll want to pick a setting too.

The easiest place to start is somewhere close to home, or at home, where you are comfortable. This might be your living room floor after you have moved your coffee table to the side, or it might be in or around your neighborhood.

If you never exercise with other people, making a goal to get a gym membership or participate in a group class will likely not pan out. And it’s okay to admit that. It doesn’t mean that one day it won’t be where you are at, just not right now. We have to meet ourselves where we are at.

Pick a time and how long.

Make it a reasonable amount of time for yourself during a reasonable time of day. This might only be five minutes (even if this seems silly). This might be twenty minutes. It might be more. It might be in the middle of the afternoon, it might be in the morning, it might be just before bed. It really doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things so long as it’s going to be doable.

We want to build tolerance for discomfort until it becomes a habit. If you want to be a 5am gym riser, you are more likely to get there by starting with a midafternoon power walk. While there may be better times to exercise, we can build on that later. To build tolerance for a habit, you will want to start with what is most reasonable for you first.

Examples:

I am going to pace in my kitchen for ten minutes right after breakfast while I listen to music.

I am going to take a fifteen-minute walk around the office building before I eat my lunch.

I am going to do ten minutes of yoga before bed.

I am going to a two-minute set of chair exercises in my office chair before I clock in every morning.

Remember: You are starting with baby steps to build up tolerance. While good for us, exercise is stress on the body and brain and a lot of us don’t have the ability to work through the discomfort of it, but we can start small to get us there. Over time, that tolerance will build and things that once seemed difficult, can finally be accomplished.

It is better to do anything at all, than nothing ever.

Step two:

Try to distance yourself from thoughts that will hold you back.

You might have thoughts like:

What’s the point of doing something for only 5 minutes?

I’ll never get to be where I want to be.

I just don’t have the ability I once had.

People will think this is stupid.

It’s painful.

I have nothing to wear while doing it.

These thoughts only have power over you if you allow them to. So, try and get some distance. Right now, they are standing in your way. Don’t try to argue with yourself on whether or not a thought is true or untrue. Don’t try to convince yourself of anything and certainly don’t lie to yourself. The fact is, what you are trying very well may be silly or easy to someone else or just plain embarrassing. But we can’t hide from it. Choose to acknowledge your thoughts and then set them aside. It might be helpful to visualize the thoughts as objects that you look at and set into a box right before you start.

Make a commitment to yourself. Identify what really is most important to you and decide every day that the discomfort of exercise is worth pursuing what you truly care about.

Rely on your commitment rather than your motivation. You will likely run out of motivation very quickly. There will be days when you wake up and don’t feel like it. Rely on the commitment you made to yourself. Rely on the idea of what is most important to yourself.

Step three:

Offer yourself compassion, but still hold yourself accountable.

You aren’t going to get anywhere by beating yourself up. Understand that it is okay to fail, not meet a goal, or to not be where you’d like to be. It’s okay that maybe you haven’t been taking care of yourself the best lately, or even for a long time. You may want to talk down to yourself, call yourself names, or discourage yourself. You don’t deserve that. And it isn’t going to help you become something different or implement change.

Do your best to talk to yourself in a neutral or an encouraging way. Think of a traditional learning environment. Would you be successful in your algebra class if the teacher was in your face putting you down all day, telling the whole class how incredibly stupid you are? No. You’d probably just cry. You won’t become your best self until you treat yourself like you believe you deserve the best. Kindness will go a long way.

At the same time, don’t use compassion as a guise to make excuses for yourself. If you didn’t go on your walk on Tuesday, it’s okay. But don’t let that excuse you from setting the expectation that you are going to do it on Wednesday.

It is more compassionate to hold yourself accountable, than to not have any boundaries with yourself. Think of a young child. It wouldn’t be very compassionate for a mother to let her child do whatever they wanted because the child would never learn skills and would ultimately suffer. You want boundaries for yourself and expectations. You just want them to be reasonable and offered in kindness.

Step Five:

Finally, when things feel easy, you know it’s time to get uncomfortable again. When you’ve been doing your baby step for a while and it doesn’t seem like a challenge anymore, you can build on the habit!

Try adding time, adding a new exercise, changing the time of day, or implementing other good habits.

An example:

Five minute walk every day for two weeks.

Ten minute walk every day for two weeks.

Twenty minute walk every day for a month.

Twenty-minute walk most days, fifteen-minute run on two days.

Completing a 5k race, walking or running most days.

Starting small will build over time until you’ve created something worth bragging about. And not only will you have successfully created a healthy exercise habit that will benefit you physically and mentally, but you will have built up tolerance for the uncomfortable. This tolerance will transfer to other areas of your life like social anxiety, work deadlines, tough conversations with family members, or financial budgeting.

This article doesn’t just apply to an exercise habit. It can apply to building any habit.

Trust yourself to get started. You are enough!