Leveraging Personal Habits Gives Me Hope

On Sunday in Relief Society, someone ask for a show of hands for those who had set new year’s goals. There was the usual show of chagrin on faces about new year’s resolutions. A couple of people raised their hands a little. I raised mine just a bit. But I wanted to raise it high in the air and shake it around.  Not for other people to see. I was just feeling that much excitement about being able to leverage habits in my life for personal improvement.

For the first time in forever, I actually believe I will make consistent and significant progress on my objectives for the year. I’m thrilled to feel like I have the means to do it. Like most people, I have failed with my resolutions so many times that I began to give up hope that I would ever keep them.

At some point I’d begun to think that with not being naturally organized, having trouble focusing, not being very high energy, and not being type A and driven, that I was never going to figure out how to be consistent and get significant forward momentum going.

The two books that changed my thinking are the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, and Atomic Habits by James Clear. From Duhigg I got the science behind habits and from Clear I received a process I can follow. Both books have some of the science and of process.

After reading the Power of Habit, I was totally excited about the potential for habits to change my life. I had also gained a greater understanding of how they already affect my life, whether I realize it or not. Yet I found myself a bit fuzzy on how to use the information going forward.

At the time I was significantly struggling with frustration about getting distracted by my devices. Also, for many years I have fought to establish some habits that are very important to me, without being entirely successful.

I started looking for apps to help me track habits. Habitify was somewhat helpful. Then I found an app that has been working better for me, in a very unexpected place. Habitica is a free habit tracking app that I downloaded for my son. It uses game play to incentivize getting done the things you would like to.

I don’t care about the game play aspect, but it is set up in a simple way that works for me. It is quick and effective. It has three categories where you can add tasks. Dailies; where I put just a few things that I want to be working on EVERY day without fail. To-Dos; where I put tasks that I want to do today, or soon, which are not recurrent items. And Habits; where I put things that I want to do, but not daily, or things that are lesser priority than my dailies.

Another app I found that has been helpful for me is a virtual tree growing app. I use it to keep me focused on the tasks I want to be working on instead of my devices. You can set the time to any that you would like. The default is 25 minutes. Click to grow a tree and the 25-minute timer starts. If you click to something else on your device during that time, it will stop the tree from growing. You can grow a virtual forest, one tree (25 minutes not focused on your device), at a time.

I would start growing a tree and work on the most important thing in my day first. When that finished, I would start growing another tree and work on my second most important task. Sometimes I could get more than one done in the 25 minutes. The important thing was to stayed focused on accomplishing my desired tasks while the timer was ticking. Then I could check them off in habitica.

In this way, I made some progress with adding a couple of very small habits. Also at being much more consistent with habits I’d been working on for a long time. Two small things that have successfully become daily habits now are flossing my teeth and studying French for at least five minutes a day. Neither are a big deal, but it feels like a win to be very steady in accomplishing something new. It helps me feel more confident that I can do more.

In November, I read Atomic Habits. It gave me very specific ideas I could use to establish the habits I want in my life. One of my favorite thoughts from the book is the Two-Minute-Rule. If you want to add a habit to your routine, start by breaking it down to a two-minute task.

James Clear suggests that for starting a jogging habit, you might begin by setting the time and place you are going to do it. At that time and place, just get on your running shoes. Keep that two-minute commitment to yourself first. Get the beginning of the habit established, and then add to it. The next step might be stepping out your door. Eventually the whole habit flows from those first established two minutes. Your brain’s habit loop will take over. Then your job is just showing up.

My daughter is doing four days a week of physical therapy to try and build up blood volume to her heart and improve her POTS symptoms. Progress is extremely slow because of her physical limitations. In the beginning, she pedaled the recumbent bike backwards for just a few minutes. Even with no tension, pedaling forward was too much.

She always feels sick and she always hurts. No day feels like a day she should do physical therapy. I keep telling her, “your job is just to show up”. By focusing on showing up, regardless of how she feels, she has been able to be consistent.
 
I intend to keep reading Atomic Habits over; learning and using more of it. I love it when I find something that breaks good things down and makes them very usable.  Employing the principles in this book may just become my secret superpower!