06 May 2022
In this post I’d like to set out how I started changing habits and how it’s currently going.
Last winter I realised how I slowly built up some bad habits during the pandemic: drinking alcohol on working days, not eating breakfast, checking my phone on every free moment. I started to become tired around 3pm every day. I would do all my work but have to fall on the couch right after.
At that point I didn’t realise yet how unhealthy my habits were and how much I would benefit from changing them. I started using an app called Fabulous to change, add and track habits. The first thing the app suggests you to change is to drink water first thing in the morning. They way to do this consistently doesn’t start in the morning though, but in the evening: when you put a bottle of water next to your bed, you are much more likely to drink from it in the morning.
In stopping bad habits, a similar thing is possible: remove things you don’t want in your life from your sight. It’s as simple as that. You don’t want to drink alcohol? Make sure you don’t have it visible in your kitchen. You want to stop eating cookies? Don’t have them in your house.
Of course, it’s not as easy as that. Some things you can’t completely remove from your house. Today’s society is trying to make you consume as much as possible. In every grocery store you can buy alcohol, cookies, soft drinks and more that’s not good for you.
In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg gives us valuable information on how habits work. They consist of three elements: a cue, a routine and a reward.
If you want to install a new habit like exercising, make sure that you give yourself visual clues: hang up a pull up bar in your home, put running shoes next to your bed. Make it easy for yourself to follow a routine.
If you want to break a habit: do the opposite: take the cues away. If you can’t take the cues away, change the routine but keep the cue and the reward the same. For instance: I want to drink alcohol when I have worked a full day. The cue is being tired and fulfilled of finishing my work, the reward is socialising with colleagues. In this case, the alcohol isn’t required as a reward, so drinking alcohol-free beer still makes me satisfied.
At the moment, I’m in my second week of changing habits and I realised that my smartphone is one of my main distractions. By putting it in the living room in the evening and using an analog alarm clock instead, I make it very easy for myself to have a smartphone-free morning. Instead of scrolling through Facebook or Twitter, I now read a novel. This gives me more energy for the day to come and is a much bigger reward than seeing other people’s success first thing in the morning.
I know that there will be challenges ahead, and I am very curious how I will deal with them. That’s why I decided to start writing my thoughts and feelings down.
One last thing about the habit tracking app: I still use it, but at the same time use a paper habit tracker as well and will stop using the app, once it added all the new good habits that I’d like to incorporate into my daily routine. I’ll keep you posted on the progress!
There are days in which doing even the tiniest thing that helps you moving towards your goals are too much. On those days, today is one of them, I am trying to let good habits take over and minimize effort to function properly. Writing this down is already a win.
In this post I’d like to set out how I started changing habits and how it’s currently going.
Here is a poem by Charles Baudelaire that seems very appropriate:
In a world in which we are surrounded by devices that distract us, it is very difficult to know what we want, why we want it and how to achieve our goals.