Habit Stacking
What are you even going to do pass the time during your two week quarantine to make it go by more quickly?
I just listened to Atomic Habits by James Clear, and if you haven’t had the pleasure of diving into this one yet, I highly recommend it.
I set an intention weeks ago that I was going to take full advantage of this time. I was going to write, I was going to move, I was going to rest, I was going to reconnect.
And that’s just what I’ve been doing.
For me, this starts first thing in the morning.
In Atomic Habits, Clear talks about a concept called “habit stacking”. This is the act of performing a new habit you would like to implement on top of a preexisting habit. The likelihood of following through with the new habit is much higher if done right after something we already do on a consistent and regular basis.
For example, if you would like to implement the habit of flossing more often, the best time to begin to implement is right after brushing your teeth (given that this is something that you already do in a habitual basis).
I decided to use this concept to my advantage in formulating a morning routine.
I know that if I move my body in some way by at least taking my major joints through their range of motion, warming up my posterior chain (all the muscles and connective tissue in the back of the body), and extracting a moment to just breathe synchronistically with and into my physical body, I am guaranteed to be much more productive the rest of the day.
Knowing this, and knowing that movement is already etched into my neurology as “habit”, I felt a good habit to stack on top of that would be creating something immediately after. This has shown up as either creating a short, informative video for my the practice I’ll be working for here in Singapore, or writing.
This could be writing in a journal to simply “dump” what is in my head, writing a short story, writing a post for Instagram, or most commonly these days a writing a post for my own personal blog.
As I close out day seven of fourteen, I am feeling more and more connected to this habit of creating in the morning immediately after taking a moment to get connected to myself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Clear quotes my good pal and comedian Jerry Seinfeld, as he says “Never miss twice”, in the context of writing jokes on a daily basis. He writes daily, doesn’t judge them to be “good” or “bad”. He just shows up. And everything becomes much easier from there.
