GOOD HABITS

STARTED: 8th August 2022

FINISHED: 4th March 2023

✅ 1) Decide on a positive change you wish to make in 4 areas of your life - life admin, health and fitness, household chores and self-care. You could use the Adulting, Runner, Fitness, Mindfulness and Self-Care badges for inspiration (and might want to do some of them at the same time).

Life Admin: Mail - dealing with the mail on the day it arrives, open letters/packages, file anything that needs filing, throw away anything that needs throwing away.

Health and Fitness: 50 squats.

Household Chores: Laundry - doing the laundry, putting it away when it's dry, ironing what needs ironing, putting away clothes.

Self-Care: Teeth - brushing my teeth every evening before going to bed.

✅ 2) Over a period of at least 90 days, create positive habits for yourself, by regularly making the 4 chosen changes to your life.

Mail: Considering that we live in a pretty much paperless society, we don't get an awful lot of mail. But, whenever anything has popped through the letterbox, I've dealt with it straight away. Every envelope has been opened. Everything inside has been either filed or thrown away.

Squats: I've not aimed to do this every day, but I combined the squats with my fitness activity for the Fitness Badge. So I've done a minimum of 50 squats, 3 days per week. I did increase it to 80 squats, but then I caught covid and that whacked me out, so I struggled to get back into the fitness stuff, but I've managed to complete 50 squats each time.

Laundry: This is something that I'm still struggling to turn into a habit. I regularly do the washing, but I'm not so quick to put the clothes away when they're dry, or iron them if they need ironing. However, sometimes I would leave things for at least a week before putting them away, and I've reduced that down to a couple of days. So I guess that's better than nothing.

Teeth: I have managed to turn this into a habit and I now do clean my teeth every night before I go to bed. I have forgotten a couple of times, but this is a big positive change.

✅ 3) Read or listen to a book about habit-making to help with your goal. My personal suggestion is ‘The Power of Habit’.

The reason it's taken me so long to finish this badge is because I forgot I had to read a book to help me with this challenge. So I kind of did this backwards.

I read Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg on Libby (which is also another reason this has taken longer - I forget when I have books to read on my phone ... maybe that's another habit I need to look at! And frustratingly, because it took me so long to read it, there were points when it had to be returned because other people had requests on it!) I eventually borrowed the physical book from the library so that I didn't have to worry when it disappeared from my phone!

A lot of this book makes perfect sense. We all want to implement new things in our lives but tend to go big to start with, and then when that fails, we feel like a failure, and then we don't want to try again. But Fogg insists that for any activity to become a habit, we just have to do something. He constantly uses the example of flossing one tooth. We might want to make flossing our teeth one of our new habits, but we forget or just can't be bothered. So he suggests aiming to floss one tooth. One tooth and done. Anything more than that is a bonus. 

So any habit we want to implement, start small. One push up. One lunge. One glass of water. One minute of something. Once we ease these things into our lives, we can move on to two and then three, and before long we've created a new habit.