Is Our "New Normal" Effecting Your Habits?

If you're like us, you've discovered that it's hard to continue your good daily habits (ex: your morning routine, exercising, meal prepping, daily business, phone calls, emails) now that we are staying at home. We want to provide you with a 30-Day Habit Tracker that we've come up with to help us, in hopes that it can help you too.  It is completely up to you what habits you want to track and strive for, so make this personalized to YOU.  

When you choose a new habit to track, consider these three aspects:

1. Motivation

Choose a habit you care about doing regularly. Don’t worry about whether other people think it’s important. For instance, don’t try to exercise every day because you think you should. It won’t be long before your motivation for doing that habit will wane and you’ll be relying on willpower alone to get you through (not a great idea—we only have so much willpower, so you want to find a way to build habits without relying on it too much).

If you choose, on the other hand, to walk your dog every day or to play outside with your kids, those habits might come with a lot more motivation for your personally than going to the gym. And yet, they happen to include some exercise. See how that works?

Find something you’re motivated to do. You’ll need that motivation to keep you going, since habits can be an uphill battle until they become ingrained.

2. Regularity

The more often you do your habit, the stronger it will become. Each repetition enforces it as a behavior and strengthens the pathways in your brain related to it. Eventually, all that repetition makes the behavior automatic, something you do without thinking about it, which is when we call it a habit.

If you’re only doing something once or twice a week, it’s going to take a long time for that behavior to develop into a habit. You’re spending more of your week not doing it.

Try to find a habit you can track every day, or every weekday at least. The more you do it, the faster you’ll develop it into a real habit.

3. Achievability

If you aim to run 10 miles every day after not exercising for the past two years, you probably won’t keep that up for long. To keep on track with your new habit you need to choose something achievable so you’ll always feel that if you make the effort you can do it.

The last thing you want is ability getting in the way when you’re already battling with your willpower.

If you need to choose something tiny to start with, go for it. Better a tiny habit that you do every day than a huge one you hardly ever complete. 

The 30-Day Habit Tracker is in this link: Habit_Tracker.pdf

(Credit: lifehacker.com)