If your savings and your spending money live in the same account, you're fighting an uphill battle without realising it. Every time you check your balance, the savings are right there, blended in with spendable cash — and "I'll just borrow from savings this once" is an easy sentence to say when there's no real separation.
The fix is simple: open a second account purely for savings, and never use its card or UPI for daily spending. Move your savings there right after payday (pairing well with "pay yourself first") and then mentally — and practically — treat that balance as untouchable. If you have to actively transfer money back before you can spend it, you've added a deliberate pause exactly where you need one.
Why this works better than willpower alone: friction changes behaviour far more reliably than intention does. A single extra step — opening the banking app, finding the other account, transferring funds, waiting for it to reflect — is often enough to make you reconsider whether you actually need to dip in. Most of the time, you won't bother, and the money survives.
A practical setup: keep your spending account topped up with just what you need for the month, and let everything beyond that sit in the separate savings account, ideally with a different bank so it isn't one swipe away. Out of sight, genuinely, is out of mind — and more importantly, out of the checkout.