So here’s the plan.
The “One Good Thing” Challenge
- Make a list of habits you wish you had or believe that you would have if you were your best self. Make them reasonable and beneficial long-term.
- Hold each habit at least 7 days. You can’t move on unless you can envision adding a new habit without being overwhelmed.
- You cannot move on early and all habits must be additive, not subtractive. Not doing something is not a habit. (that’s a good thing to remember for life in general.)
- Reward yourself along the way at whatever intervals you please and with whatever rewards you find meaningful.
That’s it. Seems like it should work, right?
Here are a few examples of good things I personally think that doing every single day would help make me a more balanced, healthy version of myself:
- Eating breakfast
- Flossing
- Prayer/Meditation
- Exercise/Stretching
- Sleep for 8 hours (this is the most unfathomable for me)
- Moisturize
- Sending a note to someone I care about
- Doing something creative
My list goes on. It’s big. I don’t even brush my hair every day.
My rewards list is also big because I plan to kick this squarely in the ass.
I started by picking one and doing it every day, no excuses. The deal is that I have to maintain it for 7 days straight. If I make it to day 6 and miss a day, I start again as if it’s my first day trying to do that habit. It’s okay if I spend half the year making an effort to eat breakfast every day. At least after 6 months I’ll be eating breakfast every day. Once I get two habits in the bucket, I cash in on a reward.
I started at the beginning of January and I’m 3 habits deep. I’ve eaten breakfast every single day (perhaps a lifetime record at this point), worked out/stretched for at least 5 minutes first thing in the morning, and moisturized every day. I’m working on adding prayer/mediation. So far I’ve discovered the seemingly obvious: that the easier I make it for these things to happen naturally, the more likely they are to happen. I have a yoga mat and weights right beside my bed ready to go so that in the morning all I have to do is convince myself to roll over and start stretching. That usually leads to a little exercise. And that usually leads to me wanting breakfast. Sure – it’s just 5 minutes of movement and a breakfast sandwich now, but by the end of the year, who knows? I could be going for a long morning stroll to see the sun rise, get a cup of coffee and a newspaper (which I’ll presumably make time to read), and make myself Eggs Benedict before work. It will be a page straight out of Real Simple magazine.
I’ve been able to manage all right thus far, but I have to admit I’m having a hard time imagining getting too much farther. Sleeping eight hours every single night hasn’t happened since 3rd grade. That’s on the list. And sooner or later I’m going to have to come to terms with how to make it happen. I’m afraid I’m going to have to let some things go. I do a lot of my work while everyone else is sleeping. Like this blog post which I’m writing at 1AM and auto-scheduling for the following morning.
So that’s the plan, folks. 2016 is the year I figure out what balance looks like so that in 2017 I can determine whether or not it’s all just a load of horse manure and go back to my night owlish, junk food injecting, willy-nilly ways with no regrets. I’ve got 11 months to go in my next human self-experiment. Yeeeeehaw. ♣
Psst: I have a long list of ideas for daily habits, but I could use more. What do you think is a daily habit of a well-balanced person? Let me know in the comments and help me to abandon my Jabba the Hut-like ways.
