The prospect of changing a habit can feel difficult–but it doesn’t have to be. The pandemic has given most of us a crash course in habit changing! In this episode, Shannon and Janine discuss some of the habits we’ve changed recently, along with some ways to make habit changing easier.
Discussion topics include:
- How under the right circumstances, habit change can be easy
- Some of the many habits the pandemic has required us to create
- How the pandemic has changed the way we feed ourselves (and our families)
- Shannon’s strategy for creating a meal-planning habit
- How Janine’s using her Trello daily task management board to re-create a habit of taking her supplements twice daily
- The difficulty in remembering whether you’ve done certain daily tasks (and some solutions for that)
- How the pandemic revealed our capacity to change
- How these new habits are probably here to stay (and that’s probably for the better)
- The importance of time of day for certain habits — it can be worthwhile to play with that
- The value of attaching a habit to an existing one
I take pills 6x a day and recommend pill boxes. I have 2: one for 4x a day for 7 days and one for a week, relabeled for 6am/breakfast/lunch/ 3 pm/ supper/bedtime. I fill the day’s pillbox from the week’s every evening and Saturday AM I fill up the pillbox for the week. I can tell by looking whether I have taken my pills (and I set alarms for the 6am and 3pm pills). I am only good from 6 AM- 1 PM). Not using Trello, but I have a list in Evernote, which I love. I would just like someone to tell me how to keep my glasses from fogging up when I wear a mask. I enjoy your podcasts.
Habits are hard to make and easy to break. That’s why I liked reading “Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything” by professor BJ Fogg, head of the Behavioral Change program at Stanford University. For the first few months, I instilled new habits. I’ve gotten away from them, so it’s time to revisit the habit patterns that I had created.