Make a Habit of Looking After Yourself

I’ve been thinking a lot about habits lately; good habits, bad habits, habits that used to be good and are now bad, getting out of habits…
The last two years have seen most of us adopting and dropping quite a few habits without necessarily being aware of it.

I was indulging in my Twitter fix while drinking my morning tea (a habit I developed during lockdown) when I came across this brilliant thread on habits by psychology professor Ian Walker.

According to Ian, a “habit is a behaviour that, through lots of repetition in a specific context, shifts from being triggered deliberately by your choices to being triggered automatically by the environment you’re in.” So, what starts off a conscious decision to do some things in some way, can quickly become a continued, unthinking, practice. You brush your teeth when you emerge from the shower, you put the kettle on for a cup of tea when you go into the kitchen, you eat popcorn when you watch a movie, you scroll through twitter when your phone is in your hand.

Many of our habits are good for us. Brushing and flossing our teeth every day, eating regular meals, greeting people who we pass on our way…these are all good habits that help to keep us grounded and healthy by creating a self-supportive environment that provides predictability and continuity.

And many of our habits are not so good for us – especially the ones that emerged in response to a situation that no longer exists. My reading Twitter with my morning tea is a habit that emerged during lockdown when I had nowhere urgent to be and was fascinated (perhaps more than a little morbidly) with how Covid was evolving and showing up in the country and the world.

Binge-watching series late into the night, wearing pyjamas (aka “loungewear”) all day instead of getting dressed in real clothes, grazing on snacks throughout the day rather than having healthy meals at mealtimes, and working odd hours are all examples of not such great practices that so many people got into the habit of in the dark days of the pandemic.

In and of themselves there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these actions, but when they become routine, and when they take the place of more constructive and appropriate habits, they can start to negatively impact on our productivity, our peace of mind and our general health and wellness.

There is only so much time in a day and energy in a body, and every new habit (good or bad) almost always replaces an old habit. My morning Twitter reading took the place of writing my Morning Pages, my late night series-watching resulted in later waking and fewer and shorter morning walks, my self-soothing with chocolate undid months of eating no sugar at all.

The good thing about habits is that we can not only “trigger them deliberately with our choices”, but we can also intentionally choose to change them for healthier ones.

But, as with all self-work, we need to become aware of what needs to change before we can change it. When we are able to consciously identify the not such great habits that we have developed, and remember which of the better routines we may have got out of the habit of following, we can choose which habits to change, which to keep and which to reintroduce.

What are some of the habits you developed to help you get through the last two years that may no longer be serving you?  What would you like to replace them with?

What have you got OUT of the habit of doing that you may like to reintroduce?

Here’s to making a habit of taking good care of ourselves.

Love,
Judy x

Tags: habits | look after yourself | self-care