January has been an amazing month for me. I never had a morning ritual, or any kind of daily schedule or personal habits. I never make New Years Resolutions (since I work on improving myself all year round). On one level, I think schedules are made to be broken. Spontaneity stimulates our neural connections and keeps us creative, but there’s also real freedom to be found in discipline. That sounds kind of bondagey, doesn’t it?
We learn things about ourselves when we put discipline, schedules and habits into effect and track our progress. We are a daily experiment. By creating routines, with parameters, and changing variables strategically, we refine until we either prove or disprove if the current strategy helps us reach our goals. We methodically, yet enjoyably, document our findings. After analysis, we can measure our success and gain insight. Without doing this, we can end up putting out fires on a daily basis, never reaching our intended goals and feeling completely exhausted.
You could choose to implement new habits over a 30 day period, or even 7 days. You can even try doing something just two days in a row! Choose what’s not going to be too intimidating, but still challenging. Break it down into small, digestible chunks. Even if you drop the ball, and don’t continue this process for a week, get back on it again! The key to forming a new habit, for myself at least, is not to become overwhelmed, and to stay in the present moment, handling what I can. That means something different to everyone.
Just starting a new habit is a really brave thing to do. You’re already a success. You’re trying something new. It’s crucial to acknowledge this to yourself, and celebrate it. Allow yourself to be proud of you. Celebration is an integral part of establishing new habits. You must attach pleasure to your new accomplishments for your patterns to really stick.
Being Intentional, Finding Balance with Personal Habits
Different habit creation methods will tell you to pick one habit at a time, that it’s overwhelming to choose more habits to implement at once. For me, having a schedule for my day was the one thing, and it broke down into multiple things. If you want to choose one thing, like yoga, drinking water, writing, and focus on that, do it! Even tracking one habit will show you how implementing positive change can effect several areas of your life.
When I wake up, I know what I’ll be doing. That’s a relief in itself. My day is planned out so I force myself to take breaks from working. When I don’t get breaks, I get overwhelmed. Super stressed. I think I’m getting things done, but I’m really just freaking out and putting out fires. I need breaks in order to be more intentional with my work.
I worked really hard over the past year trying to be not only more productive, anyone can be a machine at doing tasks, but I also want balance. I want to be healthy. I want to be happy, relatively happy. I live with depression, so being happy means acknowledging what my baseline emotions are and building from there. That’s another blog post. I want to have energy, more pleasure than pain in my day. Having this new schedule is definitely giving me that!
Listen To Your Inner Wisdom
Tracking my performance of these new habits is showing me when they best fit in my schedule. I’ve been able to determine the best time of day, how much I enjoy each task, how natural they come to me, how they effect my energy, the list goes on. My intuition told me the habits I chose were right for me at this time, and it’s proving to be true!
The personal habits I chose, not in order of importance or time of day – yoga, biking on my home spin bike, green smoothie, drinking tea (a blend for balancing my stress hormones). I want to write everyday and read a book every day – not just reading online. I do that every day already, but reading an actual book will diversify my own writing style. I also put the goal of getting out of the house on my list. It’s not a daily goal, but I’m still tracking it week by week.
Baby Steps to Do the Habits…Baby Steps to Track the Habits
Originally, I set up a two week tracking system. I wrote the days of the week at the top of the tables, and each habit on the left. Each day I do the task, I get a little smiley face as a reward. I was pretty eager to slap that sticker on right after I did the daily task. I found myself trying to judge how well I completed the tasks. Such as, did I really put 100% into my bike routine, or did the 10 pages I read really count. YES. Everything counts, whether or not your inner critic agrees.
When I started this challenge, I didn’t have a set time of day to do my tasks. I was struggling because this gave me more decisions to make each day, and more room for overwhelm and possibly not doing anything at all. Any decision that isn’t automatic in our brains takes more time and energy. This can be a deterrent to sticking with habits, we want things to be natural and easy. Stick with it, you’ll get there soon!! After the second week, I was able to figure out what was best to do when, and my schedule naturally formed.
I love doing yoga in the middle of the day. It’s an awesome break form working. It helps me stretch out, get out the cricks from sitting in my office chair, and it helps me quiet my mind and de-stress. I feel renewed, clear, and more focused afterwards so I can continue on working. I added on meditation and a cup of tea after. It was clear if I don’t ride my bike, or have a smoothie, in the morning, they won’t happen. I also noticed that I don’t get any habits done on Fridays. I chose to allow myself the day off from habit tracking. Once I did this, I relieved some of my stress and naturally started doing the habits anyway. Ahh the mind and its willfulness.
I was able to clump together some habits to form the core of my schedule. I wake up to a nice, green smoothie and reading a few chapters from my book. Once my husband goes to work, I get on the exercise bike for 30 minutes, because I hate exercising in front of anyone. After, I shower and dress and do a little beauty routine, which I often skip if I have no reason to shower – working in my jammies all day is fun, but it can also feel depressing. Then I get straight to writing for a few hours. I take my yoga, mediation, tea and lunch break, and I’ve already accomplished everything on my habits list!! I’m also keeping a journal to ponder all these changes and observations.
Be Accountable, Make Some Noise
My habits were helped along by implementing a couple fun accountability measures. Is that an oxy moron or what?
I joined a 30 day yoga challenge with my favorite Youtube yogi – Yoga with Adriene. You’ll fall in love with her. There was a new video each day. They were challenging, yet relaxing. The focus was on “finding what feels good.” Isn’t that what life is all about?
After week two of my habit tracking, I also joined a seven day blogging challenge promoted by Seth Godin. I never miss one of his blog posts. This gave me a community, new business contacts and friends, and made me accountable and visible. This is key to sticking with stuff! Each day of the challenge, I noticed myself improving, finding my voice.
Discovering What Makes You Tick
It’s becoming clear what I enjoy, and what’s more of a challenge. Energy levels greatly effect my daily habits, and what gets done. I’m pretty addicted to caffeine buzz. How well I sleep, my water intake, whether I’ve taken vitamins or not, what I eat and if I had caffeine or wine all effect my energy and mood. Now that I have my schedule down, I created a table to record energy factors in order to maximize my energy and give my body and brain what it needs for optimal functioning.
I am amazed at what I have learned about myself and how dedicated I am to these habits. My outlook, and my self-talk have taken a turn for the better. I’m excited about the month of February and seeing my progress.
I have already decided to give up coffee, because I’m sensitive. Maybe empaths are also sensitive to what they ingest. That makes sense. As a result of all of this awareness, I’m becoming more in tune with my mind-body-environmental connections. Tracking habits isn’t just about productivity. It’s about creating a new awareness, being present in the moment and making meaningful choices. I found myself really developing a new relationship with my work, myself and my world.
I’m off to get more stickers for my habit journal! If you’d like to share your habit tracking table with me, use the hashtag #joyfulhabits and post your schedule here!