Stacy’s Note: Breaking the Habit

By Stacy Morrison

This is not particularly good news for many of us, as we teeter-totter on the seesaw of Good Habits and Bad Habits, trying to adopt the former and shed the latter in a way that will balance out, making us one step (or, okay, 375 FitBit steps) closer to our imagined ideal.

The data we collect may tell one story — such as the symbiotic relationship between my recent weight gain and my also-recent inability to go more than one night a week without a drink or two with dinner — but it’s the other stories these habits tell that we are after this week at TueNight.

The stories we tell ourselves as we wrassle with these habits. Such as…

• Lindsay Bell-Wheeler on never quitting…on quitting.
• Rita Arens on using the very mental tricks that pulled her to anorexia to keep it forever at bay.
• Alice Bradley on the bad habit we all need to ditch.
• Amy Barr on the other bad habit we all need to jettison, pronto.
• And Alexandra Rosas and Vikki Reich on their love (Alexandra)/hate (Vikki) relationship with exercise.

My latest bout of Daily Habits to Track is a pretty standard list:

• No coffee
• Yes green smoothie
• Walk, Run or Bike
• Ten minutes of meditation (at least)
• No alcohol
• Read for an hour
• 7.5 hours sleep
• Easy on the bread there, sister

But the story it tells is that I am going through a huge transition: moving from 26 years of full-time, deadline-driven work running large teams to now working, or ahem, trying to work from home, alone, on a self-guided project with no real deadlines or deliverables. Yet.

So the silly little chart I made looks a little bit to me like boundaries and order, with its open boxes waiting for Xs or maybe even golden stars to mark off each and every baby step toward managing these wide-open spaces I find myself in. And to give me a simple way to say, “Yeah, man. I succeeded at something today” until I get used to the cadence of this brand-new life.

And yeah, I’m gonna start using that chart. Tomorrow. Or maybe next Monday. Because Monday is a better day to start things, right? Or maybe after the holidays, because, jeez, it’s hard to be working on healthy habits right now.

Plus I have a habit of procrastinating, so…

I can’t quit you,

Stacy

(Photo credit: Stocksy.com)

Originally Published November 17, 2015. Updated April 5, 2021.