In the last 11 months, I’ve had a ton of shifting routines. It’s been stressful. I felt like I was mentally coming apart at times. You don’t realize how much you rely on habits, especially when new things are introduced to your life slowly. However, when you have a series of abrupt changes, it feels like the difficulty has gone up. And it likely has. You can coast with less energy with good habits. You don’t have to think about what to do, just do them.
Whenever you are struggling to diagnose what is go wrong in your life, look at what you have a cadences for. There are a few tricky aspects here:
- You have to HONESTLY self-reflect on each day
- You have to recognize habits and routines even if you didn’t mentally feel like you decided on them
- You have to be willing to struggle with trade-offs
For #1, weight loss is a good example. If you are counting calories, you have to be honest and accurate in measuring calories. If you lie to yourself and believe that a 400 calorie cookie was only 200 and have one daily, you won’t lose the weight you should.
For #2, an example would be starting a new job, then get home at a specific time, and plopping down on the couch for hours in front of the TV. You just started doing it, but didn’t really ask yourself, “What habit should I do after work?” Then decide on becoming a couch potato. It just happened.
For #3, taking that couch potato example further, it may be very restorative mentally to take that break and watch TV, but if it doesn’t give you time to stay in good health, that can deteriorate too. Balancing what the right amount of TV to watch for relaxation vs. having a balanced and healthy life is important.
Once you look at yourself clearly, and have identified the cadences, you can then start to analyze if you are spending your time correctly to do the things, be the person, and achieve the goals you set for yourself.