How Building Useful Habits Today Helps Me Live a Better Life: Update
Lauren Rad is Myrth’s head writer. Today, she’s sharing an update on her journey toward building better habits in 2020. Spoiler alert: it went pretty well.
Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post about my journey toward building better habits. I started out this year knowing that I wanted to make significant changes in how my days operated because, for the most part, my life was really unstructured. I had gone from the rigidity of a full-time law practice to working part time and taking care of my preschooler, and I realized that if I were going to make the most of these years, I needed to not waste them scrolling away on social media.
So I sat down, made a plan, and picked 12 habits I wanted to build this year. Here’s my final report on how that went, how I did it, how the global pandemic affected my goals, and some tips and tricks that helped me build better habits.
The Daily Habits I Built
At the beginning of the year, I thought about ways that I could nurture my body and my spirit. To be honest, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about that until this year. When I was lawyering, I was just too busy to stop and think about it. During the transitional period that followed, I needed to spend a lot of time decompressing and adjusting to the new pace of life.
After about 18 months, though, I finally felt ready to think about how I could care for myself and my surroundings in ways that would be small but meaningful. I realized that the things that made me most unhappy fell into three categories: ignoring my body’s needs, living in chaotic surroundings, and not taking time for my spiritual well-being.
So here’s the list of daily habits I came up with to help care for myself and my space:
Morning sunscreen.
Make the bed.
Meditate.
Go for a walk.
Hit sink zero.
Drink a cup of water.
Get up on time.
Practice gratitude.
Stretch before bed.
Write something.
Tidy something.
Make or mend something.
The Tools I Used To Build Daily Habits
When you’re starting any major project, it helps to have the right tools for the job. That’s true for remodeling a kitchen, for writing a book, or for building better habits. Here are some of the tools that I used this year to help me get organized and stay on track.
Alarms.
I have trouble remembering to do new things throughout the day, so I used the alarms on my phone to remind me to complete new habits, especially those new habits that weren’t linked to old ones. This gave me a gentle push without being too jarring.
Habit-stacking.
Whenever possible, I’d link a new habit to an existing habit. For example, I folded my gratitude practice into my bedtime routine with my little one. Every night, when I tuck her into bed, we each tell the other three things from our day that we’re thankful for. We already had a bedtime routine, so folding in a small gratitude practice was easy.
Focusmate.
I’m a big fan of Focusmate, which I use for the kind of positive accountability we talk about so much here at Myrth. Having a partner who is relying on me to help them achieve their goals is a great way to motivate myself to achieve my goals, too. I have a standing Focusmate session every morning at 6:30 so that I don’t laze in bed all morning scrolling Instagram.
A habit tracker.
A former colleague used to remind me that if you don’t track something, you can’t quantify it, and if you can’t quantify it, you can’t tell whether it’s trending the way you want it to. In his case, he was talking about billable hours, but I realized it’s applicable to a lot of other things, too. I decided to track my daily habits to see how consistent I am about them. I used an app called Habit to keep track of things (but I’m pretty stoked to test out the MyMoai app as soon as it’s ready).
How Well The Daily Habits Stuck
I’ll be honest: this has been a journey with a lot of ups and downs. The Covid-19 pandemic threw a lot of wrenches into the works, especially once the schools here shut down and I was suddenly teaching from home while also caring for my child full-time (she’d previously been in half-day preschool). I also found that during the worst of the summer heat, I had very little motivation to do things like get outside and go for a walk.
But now at the end of the year, I’m finding that most of my habits are hovering at about 85% consistency. Would I prefer 100%? Sure, of course, but 85% means that I’m getting things done about six out of every seven days. That’s not too shabby.
Part of the reason they stuck so well is that I didn’t try to start them all at once. If I had decided on January 1 to start doing all of these habits, I think it would have been a mess that I gave up on by about week two or three. Because I layered them in over time, tying them to existing habits and using tools to help them stick, it was easier to get them
Some Mindset Tricks That Helped Create Daily Habits
Slipping up is part of the habit-building process.
This is one of our major themes here at Myrth, but it’s something I’ve always struggled with. I’ve got a perfectionist streak a mile wide and an all-or-nothing approach that really gets in the way of my own success sometimes. This year, I’ve worked really hard on remembering that if I miss a habit for a few days, starting again is just fine.
If I miss a habit one day, make sure to complete it the next day.
This is something I found while searching for other articles to link in a Recommended Reading post, and it’s stuck with me. As James Clear says, “One mistake is just an outlier. Two mistakes are the beginning of a pattern.” It’s the pattern that derails us, not the initial mistake.
Consistently missing a habit is a sign I need to modify my approach.
Before I started this journey, I used to think that if I consistently failed to do something I had planned to do, it was a moral failing on my part because I lacked discipline. Now, when I find myself consistently missing a habit, I sit down and think for a bit about why I might be missing it. Often, it’s that I’ve scheduled the habit for a time of day that doesn’t make sense or have set parameters on it that trigger my perfectionism. For example, my “go for a walk” habit used to be “get 10,000 steps a day,” until I realized that number goal was setting off my perfectionism alarms and making it so that if I didn’t think I could hit 10,000 steps that day, I just didn’t go out at all.
At the end of 2020, I’m feeling an awful lot of emotions, as I’m sure many of you are, too. This has been a hard year in so many ways. With my daily habits more firmly established, though, I feel better equipped to manage my responses to the other things I can’t control and have ultimately built better habits.
And that’s a pretty good feeling.
Have you undertaken an intentional habit-building journey? How did the process work for you? Share your experiences in the comments!
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