“Good habits are worth being fanatical about.” ~ John Irving
I recently went down the rabbit hole-searching everything I could get my eyes on about new habits. Not to be confused with breaking old habits.. presumably bad since one wants to break their legs! That’s a whole other subject. I wanted to research the daylights out of new habits and I did just that.
I sought out information, opinions, quotes, graphs, and even infographics about new habits…
- how they form
- how long they take to become almost “automatic”
- what gets in the way of forming positive new habits
- how to set yourself up for success with your new habits
- etc etc etc!
What got me on this kick? The first thought I entertained about New Years Resolutions. I happened to be thinking about getting yoga back into my life. Long story, short… For over 20 years, I did yoga daily for at least 30 minutes, usually more. Then I developed a hiatal hernia and quickly learned (the hard way) that many yoga poses and hernias do NOT play well together. I just stopped doing yoga altogether instead of wisely ditching the problematic poses and continuing with the rest.
What can I say… the fear of aggravating the hernia was greater than my common sense. Fear always, always, always trumps common sense when you let it.
Recently, I researched the subject and found that doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists, and other experts actually believe certain poses not only won’t hurt a hiatal hernia but may actually help by strengthening the region. So I began doing some poses that don’t involve rousing the sleeping beast (Lady Hernia) and fell in love with yoga all over again.
It’s been hard to incorporate it into my life, which is odd because it used to be as much of a habit as brushing my teeth. I found that some poses that I used to be able to easily hold for the count of 45 seconds made me as wobbly as a newborn colt after a mere 5 seconds. I thanked God, above, at that moment for making me a hardheaded gal who isn’t easily discouraged. Combined with always being up for a good challenge, I didn’t get discouraged (although it would have been easy to). I simply thought, “I’m making it a resolution to do at least 15 minutes of yoga each day… then build from there.”
Initially, I was thinking about this being a 2022 resolution, but then I thought, “Why wait?!”
I’ve been doing carefully selected yoga poses for a few weeks and can already hold most of them twice as long as when I restarted. Hey, that’s something!
I knew (from previous readings) that most people agree that it takes around 3 weeks to build a new habit successfully. So, with that reasoning in hand, it occurred to me – wouldn’t right NOW be the time to start thinking about New Year’s Resolutions, as opposed to New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day? If we start trying to form positive, healthy, new habits now, by the time the new year rolls around, we will have an absolutely beautiful head start.
Even if we only tackle one of our resolutions right now, if we make it a daily habit, it’ll free up more time and energy for other habits.
It also give us a healthy dose of much-needed confidence!
Make each moment count double! ~ Joi (“Joy”)
