Habitual Happiness

I am in the midst of tracking my life. Why?  To make it a better life, of course.Engaging in the act of closely observing how I am now living and then springing into action to make corrections where needed. ‘It’s a good thing,” as Martha Stewart would say, and I highly recommend it.

For instance, I don’t wait until my underwear get tight – as does an uncle of mine- to figure out that I am eating too much and putting on the pounds. I get on the scale. Every bloody day. And if my morning weigh in shows that on Tuesday I had profoundly chubby inclinations, then Wednesday becomes a calorically restrained day. 

Tracking yourself creates accountability. Otherwise you can ignore reality. It’s habit forming and according to researchers it’s one of the simpler ways to enhance our lives.

“Habits are our brain’s way of increasing its efficiency,” says Narayana Srikanth Reddy of The Times Of India. “Our brain turns daily actions and behaviors into habits,” he explains, “so we would do them automatically and without too much thought – thus freeing up our brainpower for other more important challenges. This strategy of our brain has wonderful benefits for us.” Quite.

I recently went for a doctor’s appointment and she was alarmed that my blood pressure had crept up a bit. It wasn’t dangerously high, but she clearly had stellar standards and given that she had gone to medical school and I hadn’t I did not argue with her. What followed was a prescription for new meds and instructions to log onto the hospital’s website to “track my health” which meant I had to record my blood pressure readings every morning. I have, and, stunningly, the readings have come down. Certainly it’s the meds helping, but, on her advice, I also stopped gorging on Chinese food (with its high salt content) and bacon (for the same reason.) I worry that I might lose the will to live without those much loved treats, but at least I will live.

Same thing with my sugar readings. If they go up I am reminded that sweet snacks and delectable white foods like pasta and potatoes are unwise indulgences for me. You might think I wouldn’t need a test to determine that. I don’t. It’s common sense. But tracking numbers that don’t lie drives the point home and is an oddly inspiring practice. 

Again, Reddy makes the point that practice makes, if not perfection, then at least, habitual behavior. “When we perform a behavior consistently, our brains create neural pathways that facilitate the automatic performance of that behavior,” says Reddy.

I keep aware of daily (okay, almost daily) exercise too. If the clock gets to be late afternoon and I have not done anything physical, well, then, I just do. A little stretching. Kayaking. Yoga. A walk. (I just finished watching the BLUE ZONE (living to be 100) and moving is paramount to good health, it says, so this advice is good for everyone).

I list the books I read each year. And try to increase the number annually. Because of that documentation I don’t have to rely on my memory (fading as it is) when someone asks for a recommendation on a new book to read. I should probably do the same thing with movies and TV shows but my clerical efforts do have their limits. A financially smart friend of mine created a budget for me once, which I (sort of) try keeping to. Except on those rare, unmissable, occasions  occurring just twice a year when Bergdorf’s announces a super shoe sale. (I am only human) With that exception, I religiously jot down how much I am spending monthly, which, in turn, provides a shock to the system but a huge incentive as well to reel it back in (return said the shoes, that is) before things get completely out of control.

However you choose to order your life and create useful habits Reddy suggests “ that we should embark on this journey slowly.  Habit formation is a complex process that involves a combination of motivation, discipline, and persistence,” says Reddy. “By starting small, making the behavior part of your routine, tracking your progress, celebrating your successes, ( rebuying those shoes???) “and being persistent, you can build new habits that will help you to achieve your goals and improve your life.”

And don’t get discouraged if success doesn’t come overnight, says James Clear, author of “Atomic Habits.” He points to a study on habits done by Phillippa Lally, a health psychology researcher at University College London who pinpointed the exact amount of time it takes to create habitual behavior.

“On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact,“ said Clear.

In the study Clear added that, “Some people chose simple habits like, drinking a bottle of water with lunch. Others chose more difficult tasks like running for 15 minutes before dinner. At the end of the 12 weeks, the researchers analyzed the data to determine how long it took each person to go from starting a new behavior to automatically doing it.”

They found that the harder the task, the longer it took to accomplish habituality.

In the end though, Clear says “It doesn’t really matter how many days the habit takes before it becomes ingrained. “The only way to get to Day 500 is to start with Day 1. So forget about the number and focus on doing the work.”