How Monthly Crochet Challenges Help You Maintain a Crochet Habit (And Why You Should Participate)

Reading time: 8 minutes | Filed under: Habit Building, Monthly Challenges, The Daily Stitch

You’ve Done Everything Right. So Why Does This Feel Hard?

You’ve done the work.

Day after day, for the last four months, you’ve shown up. When you had a hard day, you kept your minimum viable habit. When you had an impossible day, you skipped and came back the next morning without guilt. You built something real — a practice, a routine, a quiet ten minutes that finally belonged to you.

So why, six months in, have you had a week where you haven’t touched a crochet hook — and you don’t feel motivated to pick one up?

You were told it takes an average of 66 days to form a habit. You did the days. So why does this suddenly feel so hard?

If you’re asking yourself the classic — and completely unfair — question of “What is wrong with me?”, let me stop you right there.

Nothing. You are normal. This feeling is normal.

And the answer, while it may be slightly annoying in how simple it is, is this: maintaining a habit is fundamentally different from creating one. The mechanisms that build a habit are not the same mechanisms that sustain one. Understanding that distinction changes everything.

Let’s break it down.

Habit Formation vs. Habit Maintenance: What the Research Shows

Most habit content focuses on starting. On building the loop, finding the anchor point, showing up consistently enough that the behavior becomes automatic. That’s habit formation — and you’ve already done it.

What almost nobody talks about is what comes next.

Habit maintenance is its own distinct phase, driven by entirely different factors, challenged by entirely different obstacles, and predicted by entirely different measures of success. Here’s what the research shows about how they compare:

Research: Lally et al. (2010); Lally & Gardner (2013); Rothman (2000); Kwasnicka et al. (2016); Bouton (2014)

Three Things That Matter Most in the Maintenance Phase

Of the nine aspects in that table, three are most directly relevant to where you are right now — and most directly addressed by monthly challenges. Let’s look at each one.

1. The Mental Shift

The first question worth asking when a formed habit suddenly feels hard: are you still in the formation phase, or have you made the shift into maintenance?

If showing up still requires significant conscious effort — if you have to actively remind yourself and push yourself to crochet — you may not yet be fully through the formation phase. That’s fine. Keep going. The minimum viable habit exists precisely for this stretch.

But if your crochet routine has become automatic — if you just show up without much deliberate thought — and you’re experiencing a lapse anyway, that’s a maintenance challenge. The mechanisms that got you here are no longer the primary ones you need. You’ve outgrown the formation tools. What you need now are the maintenance ones.

The mental shift from “How do I start?” to “How do I keep this enjoyable and sustainable?” is not a failure of discipline. It’s a sign of progress. It means the habit worked.

2. The Biggest Challenges: Boredom and Disengagement

Research consistently identifies two primary reasons formed habits collapse in the maintenance phase: boredom and disengagement. (Kwasnicka et al., 2016; Bouton, 2014)

These aren’t character flaws. They’re predictable, documented phenomena that happen to virtually everyone who builds a long-term habit. The question isn’t whether you’ll encounter them — you will — but whether you have tools in place to address them when they arrive.

The good news: boredom and disengagement each have well-researched antidotes. Boredom is countered by enjoyment and behavioral variety — keeping the activity fresh, changing contexts, introducing new challenges. Disengagement is countered by positive feedback and community connection — things that provide meaning, accountability, and the experience of being seen in your practice.

Which brings us to the third factor.

3. The Predictors of Success

What actually predicts whether a habit survives the maintenance phase? Not motivation — the research is clear that motivation is most relevant early in the formation stage and becomes less critical once the habit loop is established. (Rothman, 2000)

What predicts long-term maintenance is a different set of factors entirely: meaning, enjoyment, identity, flexibility, and environmental support. The habit needs to remain personally significant, genuinely enjoyable, and embedded in a context that keeps supporting it. Without these, even a well-formed habit will slowly lose its hold.

This is exactly the gap that monthly challenges are designed to fill.

How Monthly Challenges Address the Maintenance Factors

Monthly challenges aren’t about making more projects or hitting productivity targets. They’re a direct response to the research on what keeps long-term habits alive.

Research: Kwasnicka et al. (2016); Rothman (2000); Bouton (2014)

One note on that last factor — meaning and purpose — because it deserves a moment. Two of the monthly challenges in The Daily Stitch are specifically focused on creating projects or clearing supplies to donate to a local charity. Looking outside your own project wish list provides a depth of meaning that personal projects alone can’t always reach. Contribution is one of the most powerful long-term motivators in the research — and it’s built into the challenge calendar for exactly that reason.

What This Looks Like in Practice

To make this concrete: monthly challenges work because each one targets a specific maintenance mechanism. The challenge isn’t arbitrary. It’s chosen because it addresses something the research identifies as essential for long-term habit health.

A few examples from The Daily Stitch challenge calendar:

🧶 Crochet Outside → Novelty + Enjoyment A change of context is one of the most effective antidotes to boredom. Same habit, new environment, meaningfully different experience.

🧶 Finish a Forgotten WIP → Accomplishment + Satisfaction Completion generates positive feedback. Digging out an abandoned project and seeing it through delivers a specific kind of satisfaction that starting new projects never quite replicates.

🧶 Shop in Your Stash → Meaning + Creativity Working with what you already have introduces a creative constraint that many people find more engaging, not less. It also connects your practice to a sense of resourcefulness and intention.

🧶 Crochet in a New Location → Context Diversification Research on habit resilience shows that habits practiced across varied contexts are more durable. (Bouton, 2014) A habit that only works at home, in your chair, after bedtime, is more fragile than one that travels with you.

🧶 Compliment Your Community → Social Connection This one is simple and quietly powerful. Connection — being witnessed in your practice, witnessing others — is one of the most consistent predictors of maintenance success across the research.

This Isn’t About Motivation

One thing worth saying clearly before we close: monthly challenges are not a motivation hack.

Motivation is the energy that gets you started. It’s most available at the beginning, it’s unreliable over time, and relying on it as a long-term maintenance strategy is one of the most common reasons habits collapse. The research is unambiguous on this. (Rothman, 2000; Kwasnicka et al., 2016)

What challenges provide instead is something more durable: enjoyment, curiosity, positive emotions, and resilience through community and identity. These are the factors that sustain a habit when motivation has long since faded into the background — which, if you’ve built a real habit, is exactly where it should be.

Start Your Own Challenge — With or Without an App

Whether or not you join The Daily Stitch, I’d encourage you to take fifteen minutes and plan two or three short challenges for the next three months. Put them in your calendar. Make a commitment to complete them.

Your challenges should be:

Short — Easy enough to do within your regular crochet time, not in addition to it.
Fun — Something that brings a small additional layer of joy or curiosity to what you’re already doing.
Flexible — Designed to support your life as it is, not an idealized version of it.

A challenge that fits your life will always beat a perfect challenge that doesn’t.

The Bottom Line

The lapse you experienced six months in wasn’t a failure. It was a signal — one that the research predicted and one that has a clear, well-supported response.

Maintaining a habit requires different tools than building one. It requires enjoyment, identity reinforcement, behavioral variety, positive feedback, community connection, and renewed meaning. Monthly challenges address all of these factors. They keep your creative practice engaging, connected, and personally significant — which is precisely what the research says a long-term habit needs to survive.

You built something real. Monthly challenges help you keep it.

The Daily Stitch includes a monthly challenges built directly around the habit maintenance research described in this post — along with a community of moms who are doing exactly what you’re doing. Free to try.→ Try The Daily Stitch Free

Ready to learn more about how community impacts habit maintenance. → Read the post: Why Community Matters

Citations

Bouton, M. E. (2014). Why behavior change is difficult to sustain. Preventive Medicine, 68, 29–36. DOI: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2014.06.010

Kwasnicka, D., Dombrowski, S. U., White, M., & Sniehotta, F. (2016). Theoretical explanations for maintenance of behaviour change: A systematic review of behaviour theories. Health Psychology Review, 10(3), 277–296. DOI: 10.1080/17437199.2016.1151372

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. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.674

Lally, P., & Gardner, B. (2013). Promoting habit formation. Health Psychology Review, 7(S1), S137–S158. DOI: 10.1080/17437199.2011.603640

Rothman, A. J. (2000). Toward a theory of health behavior change: An experimental investigation of the role of anticipated regret. Health Psychology, 19(1), 64–74. DOI: 10.1037/0278-6133.19.Suppl1.64