Happy Sunday!
And welcome to today's edition of 'Conscious living with Purnima'. Today I invite you to explore with me what it takes to create sustainable habits.
As always, I will share with you experiences from my own experiments with life. I hope you find them useful.
Most of us know that the key to experiencing long term positive results is through repetition of a positive action (thereby making it a habit - a subconscious autopilot response requiring minimal energy expenditure). Habits & routines are key to sustaining whatever results we wish to experience. Something you already know :)
However, no amount of reading books on building habits or hiring coaches to guide you or 'knowing what to do' is going to fully help you. The reason is no matter what strategy you have come across or no matter how knowledgeable your coach is, if you do not 'realize' the value of repeating the action, the habit will not stick. And it will just remain a short-term fix. You will find that you need to keep reading the same book on habit building, hiring the same coach, repeating the same program an endless number of times. So how do you break free from this cycle & adopt the habit into your life once & for all?
Here are 2 ideas to consider:
A. Understand how cause & effect play out in your life:
You already know that actions bring result & better actions bring better results. But are you paying attention to what these better actions are 'for you'? That's the key to unlock whatever is blocking you from making habits stick.
I struggled with building good sleep habits for a very long time. I knew enough about what needed to be done but was just not getting around to experiencing results until I finally decided to plunge myself completely into 'DOING'. It took me several months of experimentation to finally arrive at 2 things that worked for me. Note, not 10 things but just 2 things. And by doing those 2 things alone I manage a sleep score of over 85, most days. I don't need to revisit a book, article or program on Sleep again.
I won't be telling you what those 2 things are because that will defeat the purpose of this article. The point here is that you need to figure out what works for you. Cause & effect play out differently for different individuals. Understand that idea deeply. And don't misconstrue it to mean you should not read a book on habits or enroll for a program. Those are great tools to fill knowledge gaps you may have but it's just not enough to make the habits you wish to ingrain sustainable.
B. Involvement
The next thing to consider is your involvement in building the habit. Your willingness to work with your mind blocks and environmental constrains will play a big role in making the habit stick long term.
I have spoken to you earlier about my intention to stay consistent with my reading habit. So, what I do is divide my day into three 5-hour chunks: 6-11 am, 11- 4 pm & 4- 9 pm. I look at plugging in a minimum of 10 mins of reading into each of these 5-hour chunks. 10 mins in 5 hours you will agree is extremely doable & with this approach I have been able to break the mind block of 'not enough time' to read. Each day I get a min 30 mins of reading time, maximum depends. And this is something I have been able to sustain.
Now, look at some of your own habits and how much of energy you are investing in making them concrete. If you don't seem to have the willingness to work with your mind blocks and environmental constrains, then perhaps the habit isn't that relevant for you at this point in time. Let it go. And wait for a trigger/ wakeup call or whatever else to spur you into action. Until then pursue the more naturally pressing things.
I will conclude this post with an excerpt I read in the book Zen - The Art of Simple Living by Shunmyo Masuno on “Thinking with your own head". It goes:
“Knowledge and wisdom - they may appear to be the same, but they are not. Things you learn either at a school or on your own - this is knowledge. Wisdom, on the other hand, is what you know from actually putting these things to use. Both knowledge and wisdom are important for living a happy life. You must not privilege one over the other. Keep them in balance.
In today's world, when we're constantly inundated with information, there is a tendency to neglect using our own brains to think. It can often seem we're about to burst with knowledge. But how you live your life is your own decisions. And this is all the more reason to have wisdom - to help you decide how to go about your life once you've acquainted yourself with the various ways there are to live.
See as much as you can. Feel as much as you can. And make sure to think with your own head."