What I am learning about habits...

We are all habitual, big surprise. Our habits form our days. Our food choices are habitual. The way we feel, our moods, our reactions, it is all habitual. The funny thing about habits is that they sort of sneak up on us and once they are rooted into our being, they are pretty hard to change. I used to habitual eat all the cookies in the house, at least if I ate them all I would not have to think about them anymore. Then the following day I would be frantic, needing exercise, snapping at my husband and daughter for the slightest thing. I patterned my days around chaos, knowing that if I could just change the methods, life would calm down. But I had put myself in a habitual state of chaos and it was largely dictated by the way I was fueling my body. Another funny thing about habits is that even when we think we have made a change and we are feeling great, they sneak back in. Lots of us are used to feeling bad; feeling fat, frantic and chaotic, generally not liking the people we are. It is comfortable to be in that place, not making changes, even if they make us feel better. The problem with that comfortable place is that when we start to change and feel good, we tell ourselves that we don't deserve to feel good, because we are so used to feeling bad. So then we do whatever we can to make ourselves feel bad, whether it is eating all the cookies in the house in order to bring back the chaos, or whatever else is stuck in our memory bank. I am trying to go through my days making changes, eating an apple instead of cookies, not snacking on a giant bowl of popcorn even if I am full, being o.k. if I am not running for an hour, starting my lifting sets with the left side of my body instead of the right, making small changes so it is not such a shock to my system, and not so easy to fall back into the patterns that make my life difficult. So, with that rant, I challenge myself to do something different, difficult, scary, non-habitual each day.