I Tried to Keep My Routine in 36°C Heat. The Bare Minimum Won.
How to design summer habits that survive real life
It is 36°C in Mérida and my Fantasy Self had plans.
She had a morning movement routine, a hydration system, a reading habit, a Spanish practice block, and the kind of sleep schedule that assumes the sun sets when you tell it to.
Beautiful woman. Super organised. Apparently unbothered by the fact that walking outside here at 2pm feels like being gently poached.
Then, life... Up late watching Netflix, a late long lunch that became a longer one, getting lost in beautiful Merida, and by 5pm the only habit still standing was the one where I lie under the aircon, sunburnt, and quietly question my life choices.
This is the part nobody tells you about summer.
Summer gets sold as the season of the reset. New light, new energy, the vague sense that this is finally the moment you become consistent.
And then summer actually arrives, with its travel days and its heat and its barbecues and family obligations and its general refusal to follow your calendar, and the whole reset falls over by the second week of July.
So we do the most human thing imaginable. We respond to a season that breaks routines by forcing it and building a bigger routine. More habits. More structure. More ambition, stacked on top of a life that already has a heatwave and 3 social plans in it.
It does not work, because the plan was built for a version of you who is not the one actually living through August.
Your summer plan is written by your Planner Brain. Your summer is survived by your Survivor Brain.
Planner Brain sketches the gorgeous 6am routine on a calm Sunday afternoon.
Survivor Brain has to execute it on 5 hours’ sleep in a kitchen that is somehow already 30°C before you have found the coffee. They are not the same person, and only one of them is here in July.
Here is the bit I care about
Habits do not usually fail on the hard days. The dramatic, everything-is-on-fire days have a strange clarity to them.
Habits fail on the ordinary disrupted day, the one after the travel, the one where the routine got interrupted exactly once and your brain quietly filed the entire thing under “ruined, start again Monday.”
And the start-again-Monday move is the real problem. Not the missed day.
Phillippa Lally and her team tracked people forming new habits in real life and found 2 things worth tattooing somewhere visible. First, habits take far longer to settle than the tidy 21-day myth suggests, anywhere from 18 to 254 days, with massive variation between people. Second, and this is the one for summer: missing a single day did not meaningfully derail the process.
Read that again. One missed day does not break the habit. What breaks the habit is deciding that the missed day broke it.
Which is exactly where the bare minimum comes in.
The bare minimum is not the lazy version. It is the floor.
A bare minimum habit is the smallest version that still counts as a yes. The one you could do on your worst summer day without negotiating with yourself.
Not “30 minutes of strength training,” but 5 squats while the coffee brews. Not “8 hours of flawless sleep,” but the phone out of the bedroom. Not “a 20-minute meditation,” but 3 slow breaths before you reach for your phone in the morning.
The small version is not as good as the big one, and nobody is pretending it is. On a normal day, do the big one, absolutely. The point of the floor is that it keeps the thread unbroken when life gets loud, so there is no Monday to start again from. You were never not doing it. You were doing the floor.
This is subtraction-first thinking, which is the spine of how I coach. Most people trying to get through a summer with their wellbeing intact do not need to add a single thing. They need to find the floor of what they already care about and protect that, savagely, while everything else flexes around the heat.
And give the floor somewhere to live. New behaviours are much easier when they are pinned to something already happening, so “I’ll move more this summer” becomes “after my morning coffee, 5 squats.” After the thing you already do, the tiny thing you want to keep. The heat can take everything else. It cannot take the 90 seconds after your coffee.
Your honest audit for the week
In keeping with the deeply unsentimental energy of mid-year, here is the one thing to sit with.
Pick a single habit you actually care about keeping this summer. Just one.
Then ask the uncomfortable question: what is the version of this I could do on the worst day, the 36°C, badly-slept, 3-plans-already day, without it feeling like a defeat?
That version is your real plan. The ambitious one was never the plan. It was the fantasy. Write the floor down, attach it to something you already do, and let the rest be a nice-to-have.
Your summer does not need you at your most optimised. It needs you still in the room come September, thread unbroken, mildly smug.
JOIN ME LIVE THIS FRIDAY!
The Bare Minimum Habit Plan for People Who Actually Want a Summer is a free live workshop, Friday 12 June at 12:15pm ET (about 45 minutes, with time for your questions). We will build your actual bare minimum plan together: the floors, the anchors, and the restart script for when a disruption lands, so you walk away with something designed for the summer you are really going to have, not the one your Planner Brain invented.
It is free, it is live, and yes, there is a worksheet. Save your spot here.
For now, go and find your floor. It is lower than you think, and that is precisely why it will hold.
With love from Mérida, where the bare minimum is most of what is on offer and I have made my peace with it,
Noemie x
P.S. I’m opening 4 Summer-Proof 1:1 coaching spots this month, at $987, closing on 30 June. It is for people who are tired of figuring this out on their own and want someone properly in their corner while they build it. If that has been quietly on your mind, this is me mentioning it. Have a look here whenever you’re ready.
Key Sources
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, she writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for smart, health-curious people who want to feel their best without making it a full-time job.