Month 1 of Habitmas is…not a total loss!
Hey everybody! If you were using October to try and set in a one-month habit, how did it go? (If you weren't, you can jump in now for November, or if you're interested but unsure, start planning to begin on December 1! See this post for more details.)
For me, I feel that I got that habit…about 60% ingrained. Not as good as I'd hoped for, but there was a big, sudden, negative life-change in there that hit me out of nowhere, and then for bonus funsies depressed my immune system enough to put me in bed for 2 days, and so things haven't felt too stable since then at all. Nevermind that I also panicked about my lack of fitness activities, and took on a daily conditioning-regimen too (see here for details)…so that was all kind of a mess, really.
But not an unsalvageable mess!
There's mess, and then there's only mostly mess. You can fix "mostly mess" with a Miracle Pill…if by "miracle" you mean "persistence".
I do feel like I've improved my chosen daily habit so that it's *almost* a habit, AND I've been doing really well with the daily conditioning (the numbers keep going up, yay!). So I think that, given the mess that was this month and the additional challenges I wound up setting for myself, things didn't go too badly. I'm just going to keep going with these things through November …er, in addition to some nanowrimo goodness, because I'm a nutjob sometimes… and see if another month of adherence solidifies the habit the rest of the way. Since daily conditioning exercise was on my list anyway, for December, I'm not too sad about needing to give this wad of habits a few more weeks to let them really sink in. Especially since I can tell that it IS working - but it needs consistency.
Consistency breeds consistency, you know. If you want to do something regularly, you have to start by, uh, doing it regularly. >.>
So month 1 is not what I'd call a super success for me - though it has been for some of the others! Congrats guys!! But I'm ok with the slow start, and I still think I can leverage this system successfully to take on 12 useful habits in the next year - I'm not really behind, since I have 2 new habits that are about half-cooked-in; but it's definitely going to take continued work to get farther.
I'm up for it - Join me if you like!
(Here's the spreadsheet, if you'd like to use it. I've been sort-of using it myself, but one of you recommended a nice app called Rewire that's been working better for me instead - it's nice and simple and, you know, in ze pocket. Feel free to continue to us the spreadsheet if you like though; it isn't going anywhere!)
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.