habits as a practice: how to ease up on some all or nothing thinking
this year, a little bit on a whim, i decided to commit to morning pages - three pages of handwritten text in a notebook before (in theory) i start my day. i was looking for a practice that was easy, portable, and helped me bring a little bit of mindfulness into my days. so i got my notebook and today, i have fourteen little entries.
to be honest, it still feels really high stakes - like one cold or bad morning could knock me off my game and i would lose the habit and my goal for the year all at once! unlike the habit of say - brushing my teeth - this one definitely feels fragile and like it needs a lot of attention to get it right. it feels automatic to brush my teeth - it does NOT feel automatic to do my morning pages right now.
but, i know that there’s a life cycle of habits. there are some - like teeth brushing, that feel rock solid, but that that only comes after some time and practice. those are grown up habits - you trust them to be there, even if, you know, you fall asleep on the couch and stagger upstairs and forget to brush one day.
but then there are new habits - fledglings! - they’re just out of the nest and they need a lot of time and care until they feel like they can stand on their own. and when i work with clients, we often talk about adding in some purposeful care around these fledgling habits until you trust them to fly on their own a little bit more.
it’s really easy to just add habits to the list of things to do in a day - want to be more mindful? add a meditation habit! want to exercise more? add a morning workout habit! before long, your whole day can be just a list of habits, an endless to do list before the actual to do’s of your work day.
i encourage you, instead, to think about your habits like a practice - some are solid, some are strengthening, and some you can retire for the moment. the goal isn’t total completion every day of the whole list - the goal is to use the tools you need, when you need them, and to learn how to best work it in to your day and your life.
the difference can sound miniscule, but for me, it’s less about “did I do my morning pages, yes or no” and more about “what can i do to make my morning pages feel intentional so that i get the full benefits of that as a practice in a more holistic way?” my life will go on if i miss day 16, or 245, or the entire month of july - but every time i come back to my notebook to write down my thoughts and empty out my brain, that habit grows up just a little bit.
here is a habit inventory sheet i use with clients to help them see which habits are needing what kind of care - may it be useful to you this week as you dig into what things you’re growing in your own routines!
you might never be a morning person: working with, not against, yourself
Depending on your perspective, I am about to drop some terrible news.
You might never be a morning person.
[Or insert the habit you've desperately been trying to start for the last five years: running, reading fiction before bed, meditating, writing for an hour before coffee, cleaning for 15 minutes a day...]
But here's the really good news: there's a big difference between the habit and the intention. Just because you might be struggling to establish a habit DOESN'T mean you won't be able to honor and incorporate that intention into your day.
When do you give up on a habit?
Clients come to me often with a set of habits or routines that they have decided (normally through careful research!) will revolutionize their lives. They want my help in supporting those habits - and to be clear, great!! Sometimes a new habit is just the lightning bolt you need to get other things in your life in order. Yoga was that way for me in grad school - the more I went to class, the better the rest of my life functioned, and if it was a habit to go to yoga, it became easier to hit the benchmarks in the rest of my life.
But more often than not, if the habit was a good fit for someone, they wouldn't need my help to get it started. My classic example of this is the "morning person" habit - I hear so often that clients want to start getting up earlier, and become morning people. If only they could get up at 5 am (or 8 am, depending on where they're starting from!) they would be productive academic writers and they would workout before dawn and everyone in their household would eat a delicious and nutritious breakfast prepared after 20 minutes of soul-filling meditation.
But something always stops them. Kids don't get to bed on time, so the alarm rings after three or four hours of sleep, and gets shut off. Inspiration hits at 7 or 8 pm, and writing goes late into the night. A few days of sleeping in after being sick and the sleep cycle is all off. Everything is great when alone, but when you add a partner who does not feel compelled to get up at 5 am, together time at home is cut down to only an hour or two because of the mismatched bedtimes. Being a morning person works and is great, but it just can't be sustained without huge sacrifices.
At a moment like that, you can go one of two ways: decide that the sacrifices are worth it, and keep the habit up in spite of those challenges. Or you do what I suggest next: stop looking at the habit as the cure-all, and look at the intention.
Break your habit into the intention parts
Habits are powerful; they take the choice out of activities that we know will serve us in the long run. Instead of deciding twice a day whether it is worth it to brush your teeth, if there's enough of a reason to brush your teeth, you just do it. Those two minutes, twice a day, are long term investments in your dental and overall health and you don't have to waste brain energy on making that investment - it just happens.
But if you're struggling to make a habit stick, sometimes the distress of stopping and starting that habit (and the guilt and shame spiral that can come with that) is enough to make the whole process unpleasant and unhelpful. So instead of forcing yourself to "be a morning person", or whatever the habit is, be clear about what the intention of that habit is.
For example, if you really, really want to be a morning person, is it that you:
Want some time alone before others wake up to center yourself before taking on the day?
Want writing time that is unlikely to be scheduled over or come into conflict with other duties?
A regular workout time in order to start the day?
Time to meditate or journal?
Regular nutritious breakfasts?
It might be that you want all of those things - but I would encourage you to narrow your list down to the one or two most important things that you want to call in or start.
Maybe you really want time to center yourself before you start the day, but don't have time for a full 45 minute journaling routine in the morning, no matter how hard you try. Why not shift the bulk of that journaling to the end of your work day, and then only do five or ten minutes in the morning? Still time to center, but broken up and much easier to squeeze in to a hectic morning routine.
Struggling to find a time to make working out a consistent part of your schedule? Maybe you broaden what you mean by start of the day! If you can't get to it before dawn, maybe you get to it before the start of your writing day - you tackle a few hours of chores/appointments/administrative things, and then make a lunchtime yoga class, or go for a 10:30 am run before you sit down to write.
But breaking the habit down into the intended effects, and focusing on how to make THOSE work, can be a total game-changer. Despite what others may tell you, not every habit or routine works for every person, and even if it worked for you before, it might not work now! But by identifying the intention behind the habit you're working so hard to start, you can open up a few pathways to succeeding, rather than pinning everything on an all or nothing habit.
You can always start to stack your habits - get your 10 minutes of meditation in every morning, and once that feels stable, add breakfast! Put a workout afterwards! Add five minutes of planning and schedule maintenance! But always remember that it isn't the routine that's the miracle - it's the commitment that you show every time you show up and put the work in. Commitment isn't time bound - only habits are. If you're committed to the change, and the habit is standing in the way, let the habit go and focus on making the most of your commitment to change.
"challenge" time: the power of conscious habit resets
I am a goal addict, as I've mentioned before. I love the fresh new energy of setting a goal, the structure of maintaining it, the rewards of hitting it - I love it all. But I also set myself up for the inevitable crash when I don't hit a goal, when I miss a milestone, when I fall off the wagon, and then have to/want to start the cycle all over again. So after years of guilt about failed resolutions, missed Goodreads "Read 50 books in a year!" challenge, and yoga challenges you can't quite finish, I've learned some things about how to consciously choose times to work on my habits, and how to do so in a way that's supportive rather than shameful.
Guidelines for Conscious Habit Resets
Question why you're feeling called to make a change. I have learned that when I am starting to feel restless, stuck, or otherwise low, I like to shake things up with a new habit or a conscious change to my habits. So, when my dissertation hit a slump (as it did several times!!) you could often find me recommitting to my yoga by trying to go to a class a day for 30 days, or trying to read 5 new fiction books in a month, or starting a new journaling habit. They didn't all stick, but it helped me freshen up my day and my routines even while some aspects felt stale. But I was also equally likely to be kicking off some new plan to revolutionize everything after taking a hit to my self esteem. Whether it was negative comments about my writing, or a few weeks of feeling not my best physically, if I was feeling down I almost always turned to some form of habit revamp. In many ways, this was a holdover from my eating disorder (bad behavior can be undone by excessive good behavior until bad behavior takes back over again) and led to unhealthy thought patterns for sure. So, make sure that if you're taking a challenge on, you're clear about why you're doing it. There are lots of good reasons to try and challenge yourself to better habits, but there are lots of poor reasons too.
Pick something manageable. Perhaps this goes without saying, but you're more likely to succeed with a habit revamp or challenge if it's more of a 50% change rather than a 100% direction shift. Cutting out one coffee a day can be much easier than cutting out all caffeine cold turkey. Committing to three yoga classes a week, including home practice with YouTube videos, can be more realistic than aiming to take 30 guided yoga classes in a studio in a month. Maybe your overall goal is to read 50 new books in a year - challenging yourself to read 15 minutes a day will help you establish the habit without setting an extremely difficult bar for yourself to clear. You can always work up to a more intense level, but starting small and succeeding is ultimately much more rewarding than missing an unreasonable goal.
Find the accountability system that works for you. I am a relatively private person when it comes to my goals and challenges - you couldn't pay me enough money to get me to post a before and after picture of my body on Instagram. But I do benefit with some form of accountability. I like to know that I am not alone, so I text my Dad when I go for a run (a long standing goal of mine is to run a 5k!) and check in with friends regularly when I'm trying to restart a yoga habit. But I've found the most effective accountability strategy is to write in my bullet journal. I love being able to see the boxes checked off after I complete something, and although I suppose I could fudge, I never do. Unlike a nagging friend, or the very deafening silence of dropping out of an Instagram challenge, the blank lines of a missed day or two are a gentle reminder to get back to it.
Try, try again. I once complained to a yoga teacher that I hated my busy Thursday schedule - it was so hard to make classes, and it often wrecked my "six days of yoga a week" goal. She very smartly said to me, "well, setting a goal of six and reaching four or five classes is still four or five classes you wouldn't have gone to otherwise." That knocked me out, because yes, even if we don't hit the exact goal or target, any forward motion is still forward motion. So set yourself the goal of entering one academic paper a day into your reading matrix, and even if you only get to it four days out of five, you still put in four more papers. Try it again next week. Keep trying, It all gets you closer, which is the whole point of the challenge anyway.
Habits take time, and need boosters. I've heard that habits can take three weeks, or one month, to really solidify in your brain, and I believe it. But I also believe they can lose their power over time. So don't expect change overnight, and don't expect that once you've reached a stable place that it will stay the same forever. This where the challenge can be really powerful - the fresh burst of energy will help you through until the habit is solidified, and reinvigorate a habit that is losing its power.
As for me, I'm going to do a morning routine challenge. I love being up early, and have successfully had a really productive morning routine off and on for years, but lately I've been sliding into sleeping later and later, which throws my whole day off. So, it's time to try again, and enjoy the power to change my routines, habits, and life in small and big ways, whenever I'd like.
you might never be a morning person
Depending on your perspective, I am about to drop some terrible news.
You might never be a morning person.
[Or insert the habit you've desperately been trying to start for the last five years: running, reading fiction before bed, meditating, writing for an hour before coffee, cleaning for 15 minutes a day...]
But here's the really good news: there's a big difference between the habit and the intention. Just because you might be struggling to establish a habit DOESN'T mean you won't be able to honor and incorporate that intention into your day.
When do you give up on a habit?
Clients come to me often with a set of habits or routines that they have decided (normally through careful research!) will revolutionize their lives. They want my help in supporting those habits - and to be clear, great!! Sometimes a new habit is just the lightning bolt you need to get other things in your life in order. Yoga was that way for me in grad school - the more I went to class, the better the rest of my life functioned, and if it was a habit to go to yoga, it became easier to hit the benchmarks in the rest of my life.
But more often than not, if the habit was a good fit for someone, they wouldn't need my help to get it started. My classic example of this is the "morning person" habit - I hear so often that clients want to start getting up earlier, and become morning people. If only they could get up at 5 am (or 8 am, depending on where they're starting from!) they would be productive academic writers and they would workout before dawn and everyone in their household would eat a delicious and nutritious breakfast prepared after 20 minutes of soul-filling meditation.
But something always stops them. Kids don't get to bed on time, so the alarm rings after three or four hours of sleep, and gets shut off. Inspiration hits at 7 or 8 pm, and writing goes late into the night. A few days of sleeping in after being sick and the sleep cycle is all off. Everything is great when alone, but when you add a partner who does not feel compelled to get up at 5 am, together time at home is cut down to only an hour or two because of the mismatched bedtimes. Being a morning person works and is great, but it just can't be sustained without huge sacrifices.
At a moment like that, you can go one of two ways: decide that the sacrifices are worth it, and keep the habit up in spite of those challenges. Or you do what I suggest next: stop looking at the habit as the cure-all, and look at the intention.
Break your habit into the intention parts
Habits are powerful; they take the choice out of activities that we know will serve us in the long run. Instead of deciding twice a day whether it is worth it to brush your teeth, if there's enough of a reason to brush your teeth, you just do it. Those two minutes, twice a day, are long term investments in your dental and overall health and you don't have to waste brain energy on making that investment - it just happens.
But if you're struggling to make a habit stick, sometimes the distress of stopping and starting that habit (and the guilt and shame spiral that can come with that) is enough to make the whole process unpleasant and unhelpful. So instead of forcing yourself to "be a morning person", or whatever the habit is, be clear about what the intention of that habit is.
For example, if you really, really want to be a morning person, is it that you:
Want some time alone before others wake up to center yourself before taking on the day?
Want writing time that is unlikely to be scheduled over or come into conflict with other duties?
A regular workout time in order to start the day?
Time to meditate or journal?
Regular nutritious breakfasts?
It might be that you want all of those things - but I would encourage you to narrow your list down to the one or two most important things that you want to call in or start.
Maybe you really want time to center yourself before you start the day, but don't have time for a full 45 minute journaling routine in the morning, no matter how hard you try. Why not shift the bulk of that journaling to the end of your work day, and then only do five or ten minutes in the morning? Still time to center, but broken up and much easier to squeeze in to a hectic morning routine.
Struggling to find a time to make working out a consistent part of your schedule? Maybe you broaden what you mean by start of the day! If you can't get to it before dawn, maybe you get to it before the start of your writing day - you tackle a few hours of chores/appointments/administrative things, and then make a lunchtime yoga class, or go for a 10:30 am run before you sit down to write.
But breaking the habit down into the intended effects, and focusing on how to make THOSE work, can be a total game-changer. Despite what others may tell you, not every habit or routine works for every person, and even if it worked for you before, it might not work now! But by identifying the intention behind the habit you're working so hard to start, you can open up a few pathways to succeeding, rather than pinning everything on an all or nothing habit.
You can always start to stack your habits - get your 10 minutes of meditation in every morning, and once that feels stable, add breakfast! Put a workout afterwards! Add five minutes of planning and schedule maintenance! But always remember that it isn't the routine that's the miracle - it's the commitment that you show every time you show up and put the work in. Commitment isn't time bound - only habits are. If you're committed to the change, and the habit is standing in the way, let the habit go and focus on making the most of your commitment to change.
Ways I've been failing lately
Here's an incomplete list of things I've been failing at lately:
Staying consistent with my meditation - I do a few days and then I get off track and avoid it for days
Working out consistently/healthily - I'm either going every day or not at all, and neither extreme is great.
Going to bed on time / getting up on time
Keeping my house tidy
Working on things in advance of deadlines, even though I know it lowers my anxiety to have things in progress ahead of time
Staying off social media/my phone when I'm supposed to be working
And here's a list of things I've been doing to try and help myself recenter:
Using my bullet journal to track tasks because my computer feels overwhelming sometimes
Using the Forest App and extension to stop myself from going on Twitter and my phone all the time
Setting appointments/scheduling things in the morning so I force myself to get out of bed
Reaching out to friends and accountability partners to tell them what I plan to do every day
Talking to my therapist about how frustrated I am and not avoiding appointments like I want to
Keeping a sign on my desk that says "you can always try again"
Taking deep breaths whenever I remember to
Drinking lots of water / trying to eat things my body feels good about
Prioritizing sleep
One of the most frustrating things about life is realizing that many things do not follow a straight path of progress. You can do really well with something for a while, and your brain thinks "Cool! Mastered that! Totally understand and get it! Will never have to do this again HOORAY!" only to get thrown off your game, and have to in fact do something again. I constantly "relearn" lessons about how important sleep is, how much my mind craves some stable routines and habits, and how hard it is to work when other things feel unstable. So as you start to evaluate where you are, and how you want to spend the next few months, remind yourself that failure isn't just part of the process, it IS the process.
We learn what doesn't work when we fail. Failure teaches us how NOT to do something, what the costs and benefits of a certain method are. Even if it stings (and GOSH does it sting sometimes!) failure moves us forward. And most importantly, every time we fail at something, big or small, it teaches us this important thing:
Failure isn't fatal.
Every time you try again, every time you restart your day after getting off track, every time you recommit to a habit or a goal, you show yourself that failure can be overcome. And that resilience, that willingness to keep going, the ability to give yourself another chance, that's what finishes degrees, and more importantly, that's what gives you a full life. It might not feel good (it NEVER feels good?!?!) but failure is a sign that we're trying, we're growing, we're believing that we can do this. We can do this.
Don't break the chain.
I will now, in front of all, confess that I have never been a big Seinfeld fan (I watch a lot more My Little Pony!), but for whatever reason, one of the most helpful habit-building tools is strongly associated with Jerry Seinfeld. It's the idea that whatever you do, you try not to break the chain.
The idea is simple: pick a habit, chore, or item you want to be more regular about completing. Then, you print out a calendar, or make a checkbox form, or get an app, and every time you do it, you mark that day off. The thinking is that seeing those chains, or streaks, add up will motivate you to keep up the habit for fear of breaking the chain or streak.
Some rules!
Decide what you'll do about weekends, vacation and sick days. If you know me at all, you know that I'm a big fan of setting the boundaries that work for you.
I'd also encourage you to be specific about what the goal is - if you want to "write" every day, does that mean "anything that moves your project forward"? "500 words"? "25 minutes of focused work"?
Don't feel too bad about breaking the chain - it happens! We just start again. The real tragedy would be never trying again, not that the chain was broken.
This can be effective for long or short term goals - you could try and do something every day for a year, or for 100 days, or for a month. The secret is making your progress visible - and feeling good about the chain as you build it.
Consider the following: designing experiments on yourself
I grew up watching a lot of Bill Nye the Science Guy, and from that came a healthy appreciation for the scientific method. When it comes to evaluating myself, I often (still!) fall into cycles of self-criticism, guilt, and shame - everyone else is doing this with ease! Why doesn't their advice work for me? Why am I, a seemingly smart person with lots of motivation, unable to make x y or z thing happen for me?
I've landed on the idea that my working life is a sequence of experiments that I run on myself, rather than a never ending cycle of evaluation and interventions to try and get to a "perfect state." I'm always refining what I know about myself because it is always. changing. So I always have something new to experiment with!
Here is how I do it:
Hypothesis: Working out at 6 am will give me energy all day, and leave my evenings more free to spend time with my family.
Experimental design:
I will attempt to work out at 6 am, 3 days a week, for 2 weeks.
I will make note of my energy at breakfast, lunch, and dinner on all days during the 2 week trial period.
I will rate how relaxed I felt after dinner (relaxation/family time) on all days during the 2 week trial period.
I will make note of how much sleep I get each night on all days.
Collect data using bullet journal (aka, I just write it down)
Preliminary findings:
I do feel more energetic on days when I wake up and work out at 6 am.
I see no discernible change in my relaxation levels at night, as I often find more and more to work on as the day goes on.
Getting enough sleep when I wake up at 5:20 am is virtually impossible.
So, the results are inconclusive! I feel better but I'm also not getting enough sleep. So I repeat the process:
NEW Hypothesis: I feel better with some exercise in the morning, so going for a walk around the neighborhood before breakfast might increase energy while not cutting into sleep as drastically.
And then I experiment again! I imagine that this experiment will shift when it's not warm enough or light enough at 7 am to go for a walk, or if I had more regular appointments early in the morning, or if my husband started also working out in the evenings, making it a "together" activity. None of that means I'm "bad" or "wrong" or not trying hard enough, just that I need to be flexible and adjust to the changing conditions of my life. Viewing all these areas as places that I can collect data and make informed decisions, rather than "areas to improve" has helped me be more playful, and less shame filled, about the constant cycle of evaluation that we all tend to be in.