Completing Your 30-Day Trials

June 20, 2017

Many people find it really challenging to finish a 30-day trial

(https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/) when wanting
to build a new habit or explore a new lifestyle possibility, such as eating vegan or
getting up at 5am. People often give up after a few days, lacking the discipline (or so
it seems) to follow through on such commitments. And of course quitting early
denies these people the benefits of completing these trials.

Let me share some tips that I use to keep going when a 30-day trial becomes
challenging. Most of these involve adopting an empowering mindset before you
begin.

Make the Initial Decision Carefully

Committing to a 30-day trial is a decision. The word decide comes from the Latin
decidere, which means “to cut off from.” When you make a decision, you’re surgically
removing all other branches from your possibility space, leaving only one branch to
explore.

When you decide to do a 30-day trial, you’re deciding not to stop before you’ve
finished the full 30 days. There is no option to stop in the middle. A 30-day trial is
30 days long. If you’re not ready to go the distance, you’re not doing a 30 day trial.
You’re doing something else perhaps, but a 30-day trial requires a minimum
commitment of 30 days.

When you decide, make it clear to yourself that you’ve decided. Know with certainty
that you’re going to do all 30 days. Use the language of certainty when you frame
this decision to yourself and to others. You’re absolutely going to do the whole 30
days.

It’s important to frame the decision correctly from the beginning. Be all-in for the
whole 30 days. If you can’t do that, you haven’t made a real decision. You’re just
hoping.
Eliminate the possibility of quitting partway through. You’re not going to do that.
For you that option doesn’t exist. If you know it’s not possible to quit in the middle,
you’ll make the initial decision more carefully. It’s a big commitment, and you must
respect it as such. If you can’t go all in, don’t begin.

I’ll soften this a little by sharing that it’s wise to give yourself permission to
potentially quit in the middle if you’re doing something that could be risky to your
health or which might otherwise lead to serious negative consequences if you push
too hard when you shouldn’t. Obviously it wouldn’t be wise to keep pushing if you’d
be risking serious complications like potential health damage. In 2008 I stopped an
intended 3-month juice feast after 30 days due to unexpected symptoms I
experienced along the way, symptoms which ran counter to my purpose for doing
the trial and were making my health worse, not better. Even so, I gave careful
consideration to the decision to stop and didn’t make it impulsively. On Day 25 I
decided to shorten it to a 30-day trial, so I pushed a little more but not into the red
range of real danger or stupidity.

If you think there may be valid reasons for quitting, articulate those in advance if
possible. Also get clear about which reasons you won’t consider, such as feeling lazy,
tired, or unmotivated at some point along the way. Those are just excuses, and
quitting for those reasons is beneath you.

Is feeling sleepy when your alarm goes off a valid reason to quit a 30-day trial of
getting up at 5am? Of course not. That’s a natural consequence you’d expect as your
physiology gradually adapts. If you start having unexpected heart palpitations each
day, I’d say that’s a good reason to stop early and reassess what you’re doing.

Be Binary

A common reason for quitting is that you allowed your trial to assume such fuzzy
parameters that it’s hard to know if you’re still going or not. Don’t permit a gigantic
gray zone between success and failure. Define the border as a thin black line, so you
always know which side you’re on.

If you do a 30-day trial of eating vegan, that’s pretty well defined. If you eat
anything that comes from an animal, you’ve failed, and you’re back at Day 0. Maybe
you’ll want to clarify a few things such as whether you’d consider honey to be fair
game, but the gray area here isn’t very big. Either you ate vegan for 30 days straight,
or you didn’t.

My 30-day trial of eating vegan started in January 1997 and still continues to this
day. That’s the power of successfully completing all 30 days with clear and
unambiguous parameters. You could be on your way to a new habit that will serve
you well for decades.

Suppose your challenge is to exercise every day, to eat healthier, or to get up early.
Don’t bother with such nonsense. These have galaxy-sized gray areas.

Take a fuzzy outcome like getting up early, and give it a clear objective target like
getting out of bed every morning at 5:00am. When the alarm goes off, you get up
immediately, or you fail. Early risers don’t use snooze buttons. Mentally redefine
anything that looks like a snooze button as a lose button, and you’ll know never to
go there.

Compile Strong Reasons for Success

When I did my recent 30-day video challenge

(https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2017/04/day-1-30-days-video-intro/), there
were many reasons for it:

• to practice making videos

• to improve my skills
• to express ideas through a different medium
• to get faster at the video production and publishing process
• to expand my comfort zone
• to gain comfort and not worry about making mistakes
• to do the challenge with friends who were doing it simultaneously
• to inspire and help people by sharing insights and advice
• to connect with my blog readers in a more personal way
• to share value in a different way
• to log my water fasting journey and share some insights on fasting
• to challenge myself to do every video in one take with no editing in the middle
• to further build my self-discipline
• to enjoy the feeling of accomplishment upon completion
 • to feel more confident and less resistant to making videos
• and probably a few other reasons

When you have a lot of reasons for doing a trial, it’s harder to quit in the middle.
Why are you going to do the trial? What’s the point? What are you trying to
accomplish?

You don’t necessarily need a lot of reasons, but your reasons for taking action must
be stronger than your potential excuses.

It also helps if there are good reasons not to quit, such as:

• failing to honor your public commitment

• training your brain to quit early when the going gets tough
• hurting your reputation if you don’t follow through
• disappointing people who were expecting you to finish
• missing out on the skill-building aspects
• failing to expand your comfort zone
• feeling like you’re slinking away from a worthy challenge
• having to bear the memory of this failure for the rest of your life
• setting a poor example for others
• weakening your sense of honor and integrity

If there’s no pain for you if you quit early, and especially if you have a hard time
following through, then establish a nontrivial quitter’s penalty before you begin. One
way is to make a public commitment that includes the penalty of failure, and ask
people to hold you accountable. If you don’t have people who will follow your trial,
then pledge to someone the consequence of not following through, put it in writing,
and sign it. Add some kind of punishment that stings, such as having to give a friend
(or enemy) $250.

I tend to be more motivated by positive incentives, but many people are more
motivated by potential loss. In fact, the latter is more common. So if you’re a loss
averse person, make sure you’re on the hook for some meaningful and painful loss if
you don’t follow through. Sometimes that’s all you’ll need to get through the difficult
days of your trial.
Prepare for Dips in Motivation

Motivation is often highest at the beginning of a 30-day trial. It’s common for your
motivation to dip, especially in the dreaded 5-15 day range when you still have
many days to go.

Expect that your motivation will dip, and mentally prepare yourself for this
eventuality. Don’t expect to ride the whole trial to completion on an emotional high.
It will almost certainly get tough at some point along the way.

This is your chance to build your toughness, your mental endurance, and your inner
strength. See this as part of the benefit of doing the trial. You’re doing this partly to
build your strength. It’s not supposed to be easy. This is resistance training, so there
has to be some resistance along the way. This is how you grow.

Do you think I was motivated to record, edit, and publish a video every day for 30
days in a row, as I did during my recent trial? Heck no! Since I was water fasting at
the same time, I sometimes felt very tired. I didn’t always feel creative. Sometimes I
didn’t like the lighting or the noise level. I wasn’t always happy with how each
recording came out. On those days I treated the challenge as a form of inner strength
training. There was a weight to lift, and I had to go lift it. I never gave serious
consideration to skipping a video because I had already decided in advance to do the
whole 30 days.

For me one of the biggest motivating factors was to gain the memory of succeeding
for the full 30 days. It’s another mental trophy of accomplishment. That’s better than
carrying around the memory of a failed trial for the rest of my life.

Can you count on yourself to follow through even when you don’t feel like it? This is
one of the advantages of doing lots of 30-day trials. You cultivate your ability to
follow through with action and to trust that you’ll push through adversity. If you
don’t develop this ability, you’ll waste a lot of time starting projects and not finishing
them.

Public or Private Victory?

Do you need to document your 30-day trial experience in public like I often do?
It’s not essential. In terms of maintaining discipline, I tend to do equally well with
private and public trials. When I was younger, I felt more committed to the public
ones, but now I can normally count on myself to follow through either way.

The main reason I might blog about a trial publicly is when I think it will interest
and benefit some of my readers. Visitors to my website often peruse the Archives
(https://www.stevepavlina.com/archives/) and read through the logs of past trials
I’ve done, especially if they’re considering a similar trial. I understand the value of
this because I sometimes do the same. When I’m considering a challenging new trial,
I might Google to find someone who’s done something similar, and I’ll read their logs
or watch their videos as part of my preparation process.

While your commitment may feel stronger if you publicly log your trial, it can be a
lot more work to do this, which adds another layer to the discipline-building aspect.
Sometimes I don’t mind that extra workload, but other times it makes me feel
overcommitted, especially when the logging process generates a surge in feedback
and questions. When I did the 30 days of Disneyland
(https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2016/11/30-days-disneyland-day-30/) trial
last year, that involved long days at the park without much time on my computer. I
didn’t want my blogging efforts to get in the way of the experience, so I didn’t blog
about it every day.

Another downside to publicly logging your trial is that if you keep those logs online
for many years, you may continue getting feedback and questions about that trial for
the rest of your life. People still email me questions about my polyphasic sleep
(https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/) experiment from
2005 as if I just finished the trial yesterday. I also continue to receive some
bewildering emails from people wanting to be my slaves because they read my 2011
April Fools Day post about recruiting slaves
(https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/04/help-wanted/).

I don’t think that publicly logging your trial is the best choice for accountability. If
you want extra accountability, get an accountability buddy to help you stay on track.
A more compelling reason for public logging is that you’re interested in creating
something of enduring value for others. If you don’t think your trial would qualify as
a source of enduring value, you don’t need to create public logs of the experience.
Train Up

If you’re having trouble consistently making it through all 30 days, ease off and start
with shorter trials like 5, 7, or 10 days. Make the weight lighter. Then if you’ve hit
your initial goal, you can extend the goal by a few days and keep going. This is a
great way to condition your mind for a series of successes, no matter how far you go.

Once you achieve consistency with shorter trials and don’t quit in the middle, you
can build up to 30 days and beyond.

If you aren’t finishing the majority of the 30-day trials you commit to, then you have
a problem. You’re training your brain to get weaker in this area, and you need to nip
that in the bud. Drop down to shorter trials, and make sure you’re nailing them.
When you’re achieving strong consistency with shorter trials (like an 80% finishing
rate or better), then consider extending to longer trials.

I’ve done some 365-day challenges in previous years but only after getting good
results with shorter challenges. It’s important to build trust with yourself first. Then
when you commit to a 365-day challenge, you’ll have built enough discipline to
know that you’ll complete it, and you won’t make the decision lightly. Interestingly,
a 365-day challenge can be easier than a 30-day one due to increased feelings of
commitment.

It’s really powerful to build up your inner strength to keep taking action in spite of
obstacles and to turn your back on weak excuses. Then when you commit to a trial,
you’ll know with a high degree of certainty that you’ll cross the finish line if you
possibly can. You may not succeed 100% of the time, but you won’t have serious
regrets when you can look back and say, “I did my best.”

If your trial fails, let it be because the weight was too heavy for you to lift. You tried
your best to lift it, and you just couldn’t lift it. Don’t let yourself succumb to failure
and regret because you failed to make the attempt. The first outcome can still make
you stronger. The second one will weaken you.

If you feel your current best efforts are still pretty weak, that’s okay. Just scale back
to lighter challenges, and keep raising the challenge level as you grow progressively
stronger. Eventually you’ll hit your stride, and you won’t be so limited by your ability
to finish each challenge. Instead you’ll have to expand your imagination to dream up
new trials to undertake, knowing that if you commit to them, you can trust yourself
to complete them.

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Read related articles:

Start the New Year With a 30-Day Trial (https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/12/start-

the-new-year-with-a-30-day-trial/)
30 Days to Success (https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/)
30-Day Supertrials (https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2010/11/30-day-supertrials/)
30 Days of Inspiration Recap (https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2010/08/30-days-of-
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The #1 Reason People Fail at 30-Day Challenges
(https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2019/05/the-1-reason-people-fail-at-30-day-
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Learning Music - Day 9 (https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/11/learning-music-day-
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33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity (https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/05/33-rules-
to-boost-your-productivity/)