It’s January, so it’s time to pick some habits to follow throughout the year. Some I’ve been doing for a while, some will be new.
Since nobody gave any (sensible) suggestions for a fourth habit, and since I couldn’t think of anything either, I decided that my fourth choice would be a revisiting of my habits from 2021.
Exercise
I’ve already explained that one of my habits for this year is to walk (or run) 10,000 steps every day. I don’t think this needs to be included again.
Waking up early Going to bed early
Rather than waking up early, I’ve decided to change this to going to bed early. I’ve recently found myself going to sleep after 11pm which is too late. I normally sleep for 8 hours, so my aim is to be falling asleep by 10.45pm. This should mean that I wake up around 7am which is a good time to not be in too much of a rush the next morning. There will inevitably be some exceptions to this rule, but I’m making this my first “2021 Remix” habit to try to ensure that I stick to it.
Cold showers
I am back to doing this, but I’m not going to make it a habit that I track this year. I’m doing it because I very much have a love/hate relationship with cold showers.
Journaling Gratitude
Journaling is one that I included last year but struggled to fully integrate into my life. I was debating just keeping this habit the same as last year, but then I watched this video by CGP Grey last week. There were two interesting things he included in his journal. Firstly, his habit tracker has different levels of completion, i.e. habits that meet a lower threshold can still be scored, helping to keep a sense of achievement. The problem I have is that a lot of my items on my tracker are binary: e.g. “have I been running, yes or no?” I’m not sure how to do that so I’m going to put that to one side for the moment.
But the second idea from the video was gratitude, and how thinking of things that you’re grateful for puts you into a better mood. Grey suggested listing one gratitude in the morning and one in the evening. So far I’ve only been doing one in the evening, but I can see how having a positive gratitude mindset can set up for the rest of the day. It still feels very early and despite a lot of thinking, most of my gratitudes are very generic, e.g. grateful for “running” or “friends”, but I’m sure it’ll become easier as I get more used to the process. So that’s why this is the second part of my “2021 Remix” habit.
So that’s my final habit: Going to bed early and Gratitude. I’m sure I could have tried something brand new for my fourth habit of 2022, but sometimes learning from the past and improving on it is one of the best things to do. Come back later in the year (probably July) to see how I get on.