How Flexible is Your Habit Change?

Life is not always consistent and those shifts, no matter the size, can throw our habit practices for a loop. It’s up to us to have flexibility and the way we can do that is to create back-up scenarios.

In my 100-Day Gong effort of adding daily sunlight, grounding, movement, eating greens, and drinking electrolyte water to my routine, I found a need to be flexible within the first week. Turns out the sun doesn’t always shine in the summer. So when the first stormy day came, I acted quickly to come up with a backup plan to avoid breaking my streak.

Since conducting my daily meditation practice (already an existing habit) outside so that it stacks with sunlight and grounding (bare feet on the earth) doesn’t work out so great when it’s storming I created some IF, THEN statements.

IF, THEN statements are great when your plan can’t be executed. They keep you from throwing in the towel by creating a contingency in the event your changes are impacted. Here are mine:

• IF there’s no sunlight to help set my circadian rhythm, THEN I will use my red light panel to supercharge my cells.

• IF I cannot go outside barefoot to discharge the positive electrons I build up in my system, THEN I will use my PEMF mat to mimic the earth’s magnetic field.

Luckily I can use the red light panel while on the PEMF mat during my daily meditation so the shift is simple. Eating greens and drinking water remain the same. The only other shift is to head to the gym if I cannot make it outside to walk or ride my bike but I also have the option to do body-weight exercises at home. So far so good, I actually enjoy the variety with guardrails.

How are you flexible in your habit-building? Do you need to create an IF, THEN statement or two to support you?

My 100-Day Gong

According to Wendy Wood, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California, “Forty percent of the time we're not thinking about what we're doing."

We automatically repeat behaviors that were frequently rewarded in the past in a given context. This repetition becomes an unconscious habit or series of habits. This makes sense will existing habits but how do you introduce new behaviors?

There are many approaches but two things that stand out to add new daily actions are to make them conscious and to reduce the friction to make them happen.

Adding new habits begins with creating an environment that supports them. Research shows that leveraging the cues that trigger habits in the first place can be incredibly effective.

This Summer, I decided to use a 100-day Gong, combined with habit stacking (with my already established meditation practice) to integrate the following habits daily:

• Sunlight viewing

• Grounding

• Movement of any kind

• Drinking water with a goal of 60 ounces

• Eating 3-cups of greens

The conscious for me is to make it visual but I have also used reminders on my phone in the past. Reducing friction is about making all items as easy as possible.

I have made it conscious by posting a tracker on the kitchen cabinet that I can see daily. I have reduced friction by making it easy to engage in, i.e. leaving my yoga mat and headphones by the sliding door to outside (one of the first things I see in the AM); getting my measured greens out in the AM to place on “my spot” at the table (and sometimes munching them plain like a snack); and drinking the first third of my water as soon as I wake up, refilling my bottle once empty.

I’ll admit I normally would not focus on adding 5 things at once. I chose this approach because I could add sunlight, grounding, and sometimes movement to my existing habit of meditation via habit stacking by moving it outside.

What are working on this Summer? How can you make it conscious? How can you reduce friction and make it easy? Click here to download a tracker to make your progress visual.