Happier Habits 

Healthy or harmful habits?

Habits are how you live your life. They make it easier because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you repeat tasks often. The downside however is also that you don’t reinvent the wheel, therefore performing the habit without thinking at all. Researchers believe at least 40% of our days are lived this way and for some people (especially overwhelmed people) that can be much higher.

Which is why at midlife, it’s really important to check in to make sure your routines and habits are serving you well. We think goals bring us the future we want, but in actual fact, it’s our day to day habits and routines that take us there.  Healthy habits can shape our health, fitness, career, relationships, emotional health and energy. And so can unhealthy habits.

But habits can be hard to break and exhausting to start.  So this is where habit hacking comes in. You can upgrade an existing habit or routine, or use an existing habit as a prompt.

For example, when I decided I wanted Michelle Obama arms, I balked at the 364 gym visits a week I reckoned that would require. As I perused my repertoire of habits to use as a prompt, I chose the kettle since I’m boiling it 2353 times a day. I placed a pair of hand weights beside it and do my arm crunches every time it boils. (My arms may never look like Michelle Obama’s but they’re definitely a lot firmer than they used to be!). I simply used an existing habit or action to prompt a new one.

Your routines are created from a series of habits, and once set in motion, huge swathes of your day can be run on automatic. Morning, get ready for work, exercise, post-work, after dinner, evening, bedtime, self-care routines, are all made up of a series of habits. Hacking a routine either removes or replaces a habit within it, adds a new habit, or shifts habits to get a better result. It’s a bit like inserting new code into a programme, or upgrading your phone.

Recently, I decided to create small pockets of quiet throughout my day; little bubbles that weren’t filled with noise, chatter, or thinking. I knew that trying to find spaces for that in a packed and busy diary was going to make it a failure before it started. So I found a routine where I could insert this new habit easily. When I’m walking the dog I usually listen to the news or a podcast. I’ve hacked that habit slightly by switching the programme off for 15 mins (during the sports and business news!) or before the end, to experience silence, tuning in to birdsong instead.

Simple shifts are much more likely to work than seismic overhauls.

Brain-surgery

Ok, no surgery but some rewiring.  So your brain is an epic piece of machinery, and like all machinery or computer, it needs maintenance and upgrades. As we saw last week, part of your brain is geared for survival - I call her Primal Pam. She reacts defensively, clings to worst-case scenarios and is constantly vigilant. But there is also Beatrice Brain. She is thoughtful and a lover of life. I won’t get into all the moving parts but essentially your brain has two systems:

System 1 (where Primal Pam lives) is the Fast or Unconscious part of our brain.

System 2 (where Beatrice Brain lives) is often called the Slow Thinking or Conscious part of our brain.

Habits and routines run from System 1. If you want to make big changes to your life, it begins with small actions every day, created in System 2 by loving-life Beatrice Brain, and eventually run automatically by System 1.

In the exercise below you’ll go into System 2 of your brain to really think about what habits and routines you want to change, or hack.  You will have to do all the slow, conscious thinking here, but eventually, these habits will move into System 1 and be an automatic part of your day.  This can be anything from drinking more water, to putting your phone away an hour before bed, reading some research after dinner for half an hour before putting the telly on, to making a yoga flow part of your morning routine.