Habits

Four months ago I have started an experiment on myself. I decided I would consciously choose how I wanted my day to look like and then train myself to make it automatic daily actions.

I ended up with waking up at 5 am, doing exercises, making myself freshly brewed coffee, learning french through an app, meditating, writing my journal, writing my blog and listening to an audiobook. These all are my first two hours in a day, basically before the life starts.

How hard is it? Frankly speaking, if I turn back into my former self for a second, I would say that it is impossible. However, I was doing changes very slowly, giving the activities with the most resistance some time.

First, I started waking up early. I have actually been very afraid for a long time that if I don't get up at 5 am at some day, I would loose the habit very fast because I have never in my life been an early riser. Until now I broke the regime twice, once on a New Year eve and the second time on the first night with a potential boyfriend. Both times I just went to sleep really late and I was happy I had that experience because the next day I valued my 5 am even more, I kind of had a moment to compare how I feel myself if I don't have a "me" morning.

Now I usually wake up myself 10 minutes before 5 am and resting in a half-sleepy state until 5 am alarm. My body learned the new habit and adjusted to it.

I really love the French learning app and this is why I put it as a motivation for me to wake up earlier. I also like to listen to books and to write in my journal. Every day I started going to sleep dreaming about waking up and devoting some time to my favorite activities. Comparing to my previous morning, it was always the time when I have to work, I have to do household and food preparation activities, so I hated mornings and tried to delay it by snoozing the multiple alarms. I still have my activities - they just happen later and are no longer the first thing to do in a day.

The most resistance I had to were the morning exercises so I just decided I was going to do just 5 of each exercise, which took me only around a minute. It was a very low resistance approach and I had continued it for one month until one day I just felt differently and had no problem in doing each exercise 21 times instead of 5.

Another difficult habit for me was running. I will expand on this topic in my next post but so you know the inspiring result of the experiment is that now I am training for a marathon.

#habits #morningroutine #exercise #personaldevelopment