Good Habits And Morning Routines

I’ve been pretty good at pursuing big goals and changing my behavior in the process.

I ran regularly when I was training for a marathon, meditated regularly when I doing the 10-week “Presence Process”, and wrote regularly when I took on the 10 posts challenge for this blog.

Despite these behaviors positive effects on my life, I stopped doing them after completing my goal.

As time goes by, I’ve become more interested in acquiring positive habits – for the long term.

Positive daily habits – however small – have a compound effect and could bring a sense of balance and structure to life. I’m keen to improve that part of my life.

This post is about my interim conclusions and what I’m going to do about it.

We are what we regularly do

Serious behavior change must start with looking at habits.

From the way we drive to work, to the order we put our clothes on, an overwhelming amount of our behaviors are a decision we once made, and have kept acting on ever since.

Despite having so many automatic behaviors, we’re still behind the wheel and in control in some sense. We can choose to act out of habit, but not all the time. Acting out of habit requires willpower, something humans have a very limited supply of.

In that sense, habits are very effective. Acting on habit conserves willpower by repeating many effective previous behaviors at just the right time.

The problem is we also acquire bad habits, behavior patterns that we want to get rid of.

Every established habit brings us some kind of short-term reward. Bad habits, however, are destructive in the long-term. Smoking cigarettes is a good example of that – short term relief and long term health hazards.

The way out of bad habits cannot be conquering our urges by willpower alone. There simply isn’t enough of it.

On stressful days, when we need to make many decisions or summon up strength for various activities, we won’t have the willpower to control our bad habits and they will resurface.

The answer to changing bad habits is installing a good habit over a period of time.

Basically, the idea is that if I take a situation that used to trigger a bad habit and start regularly acting in a new way – a new habit will be created. After enough repetition, it becomes an automatic positive behavior, zero willpower required.

This IS the way to long-term change, and it is backed by endless psychological studies.

But it never really worked for me. Why?

Because I didn’t really understand how habits were formed.

“Adopt Any New Habit in Just 30 days!”

People have been talking about improving habits for a long time.

The 1960 Self -help classic “Psychocybernetics” mentioned it took 21 days to acquire a new habit.

Popular blogger Steve Pavlina, advocated doing 30-day challenges with new habits. The idea was that after 30 days, new habits would already be installed and automatic. You can then decide to keep them or just drop them.

30 days seemed like nothing. I launched myself into various missions. 30 days without coffee, or without alcohol, of tidying up my room, and so on and so forth.

But time after time, when 30 days elapsed and the challenge was over, habits never stuck. They certainly weren’t automatic.

Even when I did something for way longer than 30 days it didn’t stick.

I trained for running events like half-marathons and marathons. This was a regular activity I pursued for months on end. But after race day, I always stopped running.

I Was “Doing Habits” Wrong

It seems that “30 days to acquire a habit” is an oversimplification.

For once, according to Wikipedia, habits become automatic after an average time of 66 days (and ranging between 18 days to a whopping 254 days!). Every person is different and every behavior is different. Installing a habit may take a while.

Secondly, habitual behaviors are triggered by a cue.

A cue could be some external event (e.g. getting into an elevator, hearing a certain song), or an internal “event” (e.g. thinking about my financial situation, getting stressed at work). A habit is a behavior that we automatically launch into after the cue appears.

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When trying to create automatic new habits, simple repetition is not enough. Attaching the behavior to a trigger is necessary.

The more reliably frequent a trigger is in your normal life, the more likely the habit is to be installed.

For example, let’s say you want to regularly start doing pushups. If you train yourself to do 5 pushups when the 80’s classic song “Forever Young” comes on the radio, you might do it once every few months. That’s not great.

On the other hand, if you train yourself to do 5 pushups just before you get into the shower (assuming you shower regularly, you dirty doggy you), the habit is likely to become solidified quickly.

It became clear the habits I dropped didn’t have a strong cue leading me to act on them.

If I want to install strong new behaviors, I’ll need to find a reliable cue, one that happens frequently.

Good Morning!

The moment of waking up seems like a great cue. It happens, reliably, once a day, and every day.

Mornings have another advantage. Willpower is at its highest after waking up, being mentally and physically refreshed from sleep, and before having to deal with draining, stressful days.

My current morning routine however isn’t very inspiring. I just turn on my phone and fall into the Internet black hole of notifications and news.

But I noticed that on days when I was very productive, I started the day in a very intentional way – preparing for the stuff I had to do and getting to them as soon as possible.

What if I did that consistently? I could hit 2 birds with one stone.

First, I could make sure I follow on behaviors that are important to me (exercise, mindfulness etc) that haven’t become habits yet.

Secondly, a good morning routine should fill me up with energy and start a positive momentum for the day.

Morning Routine Research

There are popular books touting very specific morning routines ². In countless articles, successful people and self help Gurus share their morning routines in a lot of detail. ³

I also asked some of my Facebook friends if they had a morning routine and whether it had positive effects on them. I found out some interesting stuff.

People overwhelmingly said morning routines were a positive thing, and had a great positive effect to start their day. This is from people with short routines all the way to those following a 1.5-hour structure of activities every day.

Some common activities my Facebook friends mentioned were meditation, reading, writing, moving the body in a variety of forms (Yoga, Dancing, gym and so on), visualizing goals, repeating positive affirmations etc.

Some people specifically mentioned the benefits of simple behaviors I didn’t think much of. The absolutely most popular one was drinking a lot of water upon waking up (up to half a liter), which seems to have a ton of health benefits.

Another common morning activity mentioned was showering, and specifically taking cold showers to help waking up. I love cold showers.

My Facebook friends also recommended that if I create a routine, I focus on making sure I enjoy it and look forward to it every day – and mix things up when I don’t.

Another good tip was to not take on too many things at once and add one activity to it at a time. I tend to go “all in” and many times burn out too quickly so this was helpful.

For me, a morning routine is a chance to start practicing some habits for the very long-term. The effect they have on my day is secondary.

My New Morning Routine

So now as I wake up:

1. Keep phone on airplane mode. No internet just yet.
2. Cold Shower
3. Drink a lot of water – why not.
4. Freewriting – either using 750words.com, or by just filling 2 pages of A4 notebook with the first thing that comes to mind. Gets the brain moving, helps observe some unvoiced thoughts and brainstorm decisions. Takes about 10 minutes.
5. Stretches – When I stretch my body feels great. At least 5 minutes. Eventually I want to do some sun salutations and hamstring stretches regularly, but for now a simple timer is enough.
6. Breakfast/Snack – I don’t always have breakfast. When I do I have way better energy throughout the day. Duh. Read a book while eating if I’m bored (no internet).

Wait a second. Did you just read through this article to realize I’m going to start every day with a shower? I guess you did. It’s too soon to draw conclusions or wisdom from this experiment.

I love each and every one of these activities. The goal is to consistently start every day like this, from May 1st onwards, and see what happens. I’m going to keep reevaluating and seeing the effects this routine has on my days, and write a summary post of my experiences at the end of May.

Is this a different kind of goal? Yep, unlike a Marathon or becoming financially free, there is no real end point. I want to start following good habits every day. Even if this doesn’t end up being my eventual morning routine, I’m curious to see how this will effect me in terms of life balance.

I’m sure my rebellious tendencies and old habits would offer some resistance. It will be interesting.

Wish me luck!

Almog