30 Day Habit Forming: Week 1 done!
Habits are formed moment to moment, decision to decision. This 30 day challenge I started 7 days ago has been a testament to that because I am actively pursuing the 2 goals I am trying to achieve in these 30 days. Yoga + writing daily. And the progress this week has been smooth sailing except for today which only allowed me to do 15 min of yoga because my low back was in a lot of pain. Instead of letting myself wimp out and not follow through I instead foam rolled and did more static stretching to make up for the yoga practice. See that is what habit forming is all about, pursuing the goal regardless what is going on. I didn’t let my back being out stop me from doing some form of mobility work.
That is what this challenge is about, consistency and finding ways to actively pursue the goal or habit you are trying to perform. Because yoga was a little too aggressive I had to slow it down and perform some mobility that wouldn’t leave my back worst. It’s about prioritizing the things you want to do and actively pursuing them even if you have to adapt, modify or hit that snooze button. So how can we then change our habits? I would love to bring back the first post I have ever made “What is a habit and how do we do it?” (feel free to re-read it)
In this post I discuss what a habit is and how we build them and break them. This post is important because it highlights a very fundamental process of building habits the pain and pleasure systems. But I would like to take it a step further. As discussed in the post you want to make the act of quitting a bad habit into a positive and the act of keeping a bad habit a negative. This is because our brains are constantly seeking pleasure and constantly finding ways to avoid pain. But is there more than just pain vs pleasure when beginning or quitting a habit? The answer is yes.
In the beginning this plays an important role in building and maintaining habits but for long term consistency we need to have more than just pleasure and pain because sometimes that line becomes skewed and the once loved habit now has some negative attachments to it. For example I wrote my blog for over a year and was consistently working on it daily and missed 30 days out of the year. Once I reached the goal I soon fell to burn out and started to feel that I no longer wanted to do this. So I wrote less frequently and soon stopped all together. For 2 months I didn’t write or care to write, so I thought. I noticed myself feeling more anxious and more overwhelmed at work. And the time off from writing was needed but I soon realized it was my outlet for processing, for creating and for helping my voice come out.
During my year of writing I had come up with a 30 day guide book written in 1 day, yes I say that because I am so proud of that 1 day. I poured my heart out into it and wrote an entire workbook, I don’t know how I was that focused but I worked tirelessly to finish. I digress. But I didn’t actually try it out, I had written this amazing guide to forming habits and didn’t put it to the test, hence this whole 30 day habit forming challenge. But what I found from even a week is that habits need goals. I stopped writing because I had reached a goal, once achieved I didn’t know where to go from there. I spent 2 months in a fog working on all these things only to discover once I started this journey that in order for a habit to become automatic there has to be a goal. I mean that is why the workbook is called, “30 day habit forming + goal setting guide.”
So then once you have formed the habit you want, then you need to set goals for it. For me I wanted to write everyday for 30 days and once I started back up writing daily it was like riding a bike. It became an automatic part of my day again. That is why setting realistic goals in realistic time frames is so important to habits! If you make outrageous unachievable goals in a time frame that is impossible you will feel like a failure, start becoming negative about the goal and now your pain sensor in your brain will associate that goal as something to avoid. But if instead you set a goal that is truly achievable in a good amount of time and then reach it you feel awesome and like a success, you then trigger that pleasure cycle instead and now associate that habit with positive. Which means you are more likely to keep it.
That being said this is why it is so important to have goals with your habit that match the amount of time you give to it. My 30 day goal was realistic and easy to approach because I just had to make it a priority every single day. That was the simple part because I had already done the habit for a year, now I wanted to reset myself and get back in the mind frame of writing daily again. Even if it wasn’t pretty or nobody read it, it was for me. Now that week 1 is finished and I was able to achieve the goal for the week (which was getting a schedule to do yoga and writing) I am on to week 2. This weeks goal is all about challenging myself to do it even if I don’t want to and that means hyping myself up, taking 30 minutes if I need to, or shifting the schedule for a day if I need to. This sets me up for success because I am giving myself options to do the tasks and that keeps me on track. Rather than being so strict or going cold turkey, I am allowing the options so that it takes the pressure off being perfect!
Do you want to start a habit but need some help keeping consistent. Well look no further because I totally can help you and set you up for success. Speaking from personal experience I know how easy you can fall off or get stuck. Here’s to success and creating healthy habits my friends.
Today was a 8.