We are five weeks into my new series, 52 healthy habits, where I attempt to tackle a new healthy habit each week. I believe that no matter where you are in your fitness journey there is always room for incremental improvements for a healthier, happier life.
As I work on new habits I am sure some will stick and others will fall away. I'll have successes and failures along the way. I am just five weeks in and I have already had some struggles adopting and following through with some of these ideas. While I write this series for accountability for myself and to get you thinking about the small changes you can make, I don't use it to feel bad about myself. If I have a bad week, if I don't follow-through on some of my intentions, I try to examine what went wrong to see how I can do better in the future or reexamine if I need it in my life at all. I never feel bad about what I failed to do in the past. The past is over. I am looking to get better in the future.
Last week my new habit was writing 'morning pages.' I did OK. Not perfect. I wrote a few days and missed a few days. The days I missed were all days that I forgot to do it until it was too late and I had to leave for work. This just tells me I have to do a better job of listing out my morning to-do's and then actually look at the list. (I am notorious for writing lists but never looking at them because they are sooo far away in my backpack in the other room. hah.) So next week as I tackle my new habit, I will continue to work on morning pages to improve over last week.
Week 3 was tracking my macros and attempting to do a better job in hitting the targeted percentages. I planned ahead and did much better last week. I still wasn't exact, but I am finally getting into the groove of planning ahead, entering meals in advance and adjusting as needed. I am improving a lot over the previous weeks.
My most successful new habit despite a very rocky start is getting up at 5:30am every day (even on weekends) to work on my blog, business or to workout. It still feels hard, but getting slightly easier. We slept in to 8:30 on Saturday this week because my husband plays drums and he had a late show on Friday night and slept until 6:30 on Sunday because...well, because Sunday. Every other day we were up and at 'em at 5:30 and I am pretty proud of that especially considering how poorly we did the first week.
WEEK 5: STOP THE SCROLLING
I have a problem. It's a real addiction. The scrolling. Even when I get up early some mornings I spend way too much time scrolling Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram and then I don't get anything productive done. That defeats the purpose of rising early. The point of getting up early is to have more hours in my day to be productive, not to waste those hours on social media that I could have been sleeping.
Then it doesn't end there. I get home from work in the evenings, eat dinner, do dishes, walk Ollie and then it's usually around 8 or 8:30. At this point, as long as I have my 10k steps, I sit my butt on the couch and scroll social media on my iPad until bedtime! This is a massive waste of time and I need to do better. I have so many dreams, plans and ideas that all require execution and execution requires time. I have the time. I just need to use my time more wisely.
I look at it as my unwinding time, but reading is a much more productive unwinding activity. This week my intention is to spend 15 minutes catching up on emails and social media in the morning after my walk and then put social media away for the rest of the day. I can spend another 15 minutes when I get home from work, that is still 30 minutes a day, but an improvement. I will unwind with a book in the evening instead of my iPad. I know with a little thought I can make massive improvements in this area.
Often our bad habits sneak in and we don't even notice them until they they are out of control, but if we focus on them and strive for improvement we can make the changes necessary to restore a healthy balance.
Stay tuned next week as I tackle a big one that I have been putting off since Thanksgiving. Yikes.
Can you relate? What healthy habits are you tackling this week? If you need some help tracking your new habits, I created a free tracker download.
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Are you someone who feels the tension between what you should do and what you want to do and hopes to make better choices and decisions to enhance your long-term health? I will cover some tangible ways to revise your thinking, environment, situation, and habits for the best chances of success. People with greater self-control are more likely to achieve their goals