As I write this, we’re all going through a huge disruption in our lives due to COVID-19. We’re cooped up at home, we can’t see our friends, and a lot of people are out of work.
When our routines and the way we live our lives get upended like this, so do our habits. Suddenly all the regular cues and events that trigger our habit loops are gone, and without this normalcy, we forget to do the things we normally do. This can be both a curse and a blessing.
It’s very easy to abandon our good habits during a time like this. How do you exercise when the gyms are closed? How do you eat healthy when a trip to the grocery store is an hours-long ordeal that risks your safety? How do you read good literature when the library is shut down?
And even for habits that aren’t any more difficult, it’s still easy to forget about them when everything is changing, the days are running together, and you feel like a prisoner in your own home. I myself have had this problem. There’s no reason social distancing should make it harder for me to write down my daily goals or keep my gratitude journal, but I’ve found it much harder to remember to do so since I’ve been homebound.
We need to be vigilant against this. All the work you’ve put into building a good habit could be lost if you abandon it now, and you won’t automatically pick it back up again once things are back to normal. Remember, good habits are about making us happy, healthy, and fulfilled. Right now, when we’re socially isolated, living through an anxiety-producing crisis, and likely to fall into a depression, is when we need this most of all. And we need the sense of normalcy that our good habits bring.
On the positive side, you can see this disruption as an opportunity to try to build new good habits.
You’ve got a lot of extra time on your hands. Time you would have spent commuting. Or sadly for a lot of people, time you would have spent working that you now aren’t because your job has shut down. Use that time to exercise. There are a bajillion YouTube videos people have put out in the last few weeks of ways to exercise and stay active at home. Or start spending a certain amount of time each day writing, or learning a new skill, language, or musical instrument, taking an online class, making art, or meditating.
If you’ve been eating poorly, you can view all the restaurants being closed as an opportunity to start a better eating routine. I’ll shortly be posting an excerpt from my weight loss book about how frozen foods make weight loss easy.
Take the time that you would have spent watching sports and spend it on quality time with your family. Or downloading eBooks, from the library, from public domain sources, or by purchasing them on Amazon.
Obviously you’re not going to do all of these things. But pick a few of them. Try to do them regularly, to make them into a habit. And then when things get back to normal, you may find that you’ve come to like this habit, and you want to incorporate it into your normal routine.
It’s worth a try. I mean, what else have you got to do?
[…] Loss Habit. Since we’re all stuck at home, can’t go to restaurants, and it’s a time of habit change, it’s a good time to start eating healthier. Here I explain how frozen meals are one of the […]