how do i have faith that repetition of prefered behavior changes your habits?

i honestly have a hard time believing this sometimes

i try to deny it (that i dont believe this will work), but then i am not productive. Maybe that is my problem???????? ultimately i think i still struggle really believing i can stick to my OWN schedule. wake up at 8 am. get crackin etc... some days i do and some days i dont.

i was never good at school and stuff. with self-discipline. i try to work on it myself.

how do i have faith, that repetition of behavior you want to adopt, will change your behavior? i am slooowly making changes but they are so slow

please help tyvm!

Think about the value of patience and perseverance, laika18.

tru

i always look for reasons why its not gonna work out too though, or im gonna fail at keeping my schedule
even if i dont even say it out loud

i think i need to stop thinking about why im going to fail er not
would you agree that that is insane beaviour confirm/deny

it matters to me so i drive myself mad, why am i even posting tbh

why do people become this way

I have a horrible track record when it comes to self discipline.

I had someone tell me to take baby steps. Pick something you can DO. They told me a story of someone they knew who wanted to get in the habit of brushing their teeth every night, and for unknown reasons they were really resistant to it, but eventually they reached their goal. They started out with the goal of just picking up their toothbrush and putting it down each night they could remember to do it. I don't recall if they tied it to another habit to reinforce it or not. They found when they focused on what they did sucessfully, rather than what they did not do, they would make faster progress.

I pick one small thing to work on and plan to do it for a week, a month, whatever I think I can do, and have a checklist by the item, checking off when I did it. Each accomplishment you have pushes you forward, even if it is small.

I had to give up gluten in my diet. So I removed the easy things from my diet (the foods I didn't like so much first), and progressively got to the point where I would say, no gluten for a week, and I will reward myself with a treat (like a slice of pie, which had gluten) at the end. Knowing that I could have it at the end of the week helped me resist it the rest of the week, rather than caving like I usually do. I also had the negative reinforcement of what gluten does to me if I eat it. I still slide from time to time, but remembering the negative consequences keeps me in line the vast majority of the time. When I don't expect perfection of myself, I tend to do much better.

One change I made was washing the dishes. I used to let them pile up and overwhelm me. It caused a lot of problems with my roommate. When they pile up you can't wash them because the sink is full and they stink, and the food crusts on and is hard to remove. I managed to make it a habit of every time I use a dish, glass, or whatnot, I wash it right away. That way it's easier to make sure it's done. I tell myself "it will take two seconds to wash this", knowing that the food is easier to remove right away, and remind myself that it's more of a pain to wash a huge pile. When I see the bare sink I feel good about myself and pat myself on the back, even though I sometimes feel a little silly doing so.

I used to have a roommate that was someone who never left a dish in the sink, everything was washed right away, so that helped. But now I live with roommates who leave their dishes in the sink sometimes and it drives me crazy! I leave their dishes alone, but always wash mine, that way I'm not resentful of washing their dishes too.

Sorry I rambled. I hope this wasn't annoying.

The short version:
I guess what I was trying to say was pick something small that you can do easily to start, knowing that any improvement is good, accept that you're not perfect, remember and reward yourself for what you accomplished, and not what you didnt. Sometimes it helps to think of what would happen if you didn't do it, and how much easier or better things are when you do the task. Once you get that small thing done regularly for a couple of weeks or so, you can try to up the ante, if that doesn't work, fall back to the prior step till you have it working regularly a bit longer, and try again with a revised smaller step.

It's really not faith in the act of repetition, but the faith in yourself to accomplish it.