How To Build Healthy Habits
How to Build Healthy Habits
I have an unfashionable confession: I avoid New Year’s Resolutions like the plague.
It seems counter-intuitive to be making sweeping goals during these dark January days, and a sense of self-preservation finds me wary of overly ambitious goals that will probably not last the duration.
By contrast, an intention to build a few healthy daily habits seems realistic and nurturing. It seems obvious, but in time, how we organise each day we are given equals how we choose to live our life. Small changes born of small, powerful intentions, can reap huge rewards, allowing us to move towards a life that resonates with our own values, whatever they happen to be.
So first of all: what’s important to you? Perhaps it’s becoming healthier, physically or mentally or both. Maybe it is learning a language (and not giving up this time!) or making time for volunteering. What are you passionate about; what makes you tick? When all is said and done, how would you like to be remembered?
These are big questions. Take some time for reflection, and then commit to, say, two small healthy habits you would like to build into your everyday life. It rarely helps to procrastinate. The time is always now.
Here’s a far-from-definitive, and personal snapshot of the healthy habits I am cultivating this New Year, 2020:
Spending more time off-line: This means turning my phone off at around 8pm in the evening and leaving it off until 12 hours later, giving me headspace and freeing up time for the below habits!
Reading more: just 30 minutes a day is perfect for now. What I read does not matter as much to me as the process of reading: immersion into different worlds; the focus needed, knowledge gained. The off-line time. Reading a paper book more means consuming less online and off-line media. Personally I find that keeping the daily news at arm’s length is a matter of self-preservation.
Learning a language: a biggie for me, as I did not get on well with languages at school and have had numerous attempts at learning French. However, with the help of the fabulous app Duolingo, I am loving the process and have been learning French for 10 minutes a day, for 67 days in a row. Most importantly of all, I am loving it!
Getting on the mat! Even yoga and meditation teachers struggle to practice sometimes! The final habit is: getting up a little earlier in the morning and stepping onto my yoga mat for 30 minutes. No excuses, no giving into lazy thoughts (a tough one!); just setting my Insight Timer bells: 15 minutes for movement practice, 15 for seated meditation. I may not feel like doing it most days, but I never, ever fail to benefit. As my yoga and meditation teachers say: you don’t need to feel like being in the mood - just do it.
And really, that’s quite enough for me, for now. Of course I have ‘good’ days and ‘bad’ days, and not all of this happens every day. The important thing is not to beat myself up and just start again the next day. And I always have Sundays off for most of the above (apart from Duolingo language app, as I’d hate to lose my streak!).
These small habits may not sound much - but actually they are a Big Deal, and the feeling of mastery when I have done all, or most, is affirming and gives a real sense of larger purpose.
Days become our lives, and they go quickly. The time is always now. What healthy habits will you build in 2020?
By Lucia Cockcroft
Lucia, an ex-journalist, re-trained as a yoga and mindfulness teacher 15 years ago, and is co-founder of Chelmsford studio Yoga at the Mill and online booking system Reservie.