Habits maketh a woman: The 10 Habits that served me in 2020
This year has been many things – good, bad, and all things in between – but it’s definitely not a year any of us will ever forget.
What added to the anxiety or frustration is how uncertain things felt and how little we could control. Each day, I woke up knowing I can’t fully control how many people fall sick as a result of this pandemic. I can’t control what disturbing piece of news I might come across as I scroll through social media. I can’t control how cooperative my son would be on any given day with his online classes. I can’t control all of the variables that might impact my spouse’s emotional state.
In psychology, there is a well-known effect called the Pygmalion Effect, which says that we either rise or fall to our expectations. If we set high expectations of ourselves, we start to think or act in accordance with that, and those expectations come true. Conversely, if we have low or no expectations of ourselves, we never rise to the occasion.
Earlier this year, as the realization hit that this would be a year like no other, I told myself I would not let this year get the better of me. That, instead of letting this year define me, I would still define who and what I become.
The only way I could hope to do that is by focusing on whatever is in my power to control, which is my own state of mind, and what actions I undertake within a given 24-hour time span, despite all the uncertainty around me.
What helped me rise to my own expectations this year is a set of powerful habits. Here are ten habits that positively influenced my mental and emotional state of being, my energy and ultimately, my happiness.
Habit #1: Daily practice of meditation
If there is a single keystone habit that can positively impact all areas of your life, it would undoubtedly be a daily practice of meditation. It helps you stay calm, focused and centered on what matters the most – all essential qualities that we need at a time when we are working from home with multiple distractions and demands on our time.
I have had a meditation practice for several years now, but this year I wanted to be a lot more consistent. BJ Fogg’s behavioral model for forming Tiny Habits was especially useful in forming this as well as every other habit I have maintained this year.
In short, there are three things essential for forming any habit – the ABCs. A is for using an existing habit as an Anchor (A) for the new habit. For me, this was “As soon as I brush my teeth in the morning, I will sit down to meditate.” B is for making the Behavior(B) really tiny to begin with so even on your toughest day, the mind will not create any resistance to doing the habit. For me, committing to meditating for just 10 minutes in the morning felt easily doable. And finally, C is for Celebrate(C), because it is the positive emotion generated by completing each tiny habit for the day that ultimately makes that habit addictive. That can be anything from positive self-talk to giving yourself a tick-mark for the day. For me, this was tracking my daily morning meditation with a meditation app called Insight Timer.
Tracking any habit is a practice I highly recommend. Each time you complete the habit for the day, and see the number of days go up, you get a small hit of dopamine (the brain’s reward hormone). That then creates a strong incentive to do it again the next day, and the next day, and then the day after that.
Habit #2: Waking up early and prioritizing me-time
I’ve always been a morning person, and normally would wake up at 5:30 am every morning. This year, that simply didn’t feel enough. When we first went into lockdown, I realized I was losing a minimum of 3 hours each day to doing all the house chores along with my husband, cooking and home-schooling our son. I felt I was constantly chasing a ticking clock, and that created a fair bit of anxiety and stress.
Moreover, as an introvert, I deeply value my alone time. That is how I restore my energy to do everything that I do, and not having enough of that was distressing.
The solution: start waking up even earlier.
And so, bit by bit, I started moving up my wake-up time more and more until I started waking up at 4 am. My husband and my son wake up at 7am, which gives me a full 3 hours all to myself – 3 hours that I spend doing all the things that I value and that nourish me from meditating to reading to doing my most important work in the morning.
It sounded crazy at first, but this is the single biggest habit that saved me in 2020. The 3 hours that I spend giving to myself in the morning is the very thing that then allows me to be fully available for others the rest of the day.
Habit #3: Deep work in the mornings
“Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, ‘the superpower of the 21st century.’” – Cal Newport
One of the books that has had the most impact on me in the last couple of years is Deep Work by Cal Newport. Deep work is work that is done in a distraction-free environment that allows you to push your creative and cognitive abilities to the limit, and enter a state of flow, both of which allow you to do your best work. The opposite of that is shallow work, which is mundane tasks often performed while distracted, and that create little value.
One of the main reasons why my mornings are sacrosanct is because that is the one time of the day when I can hunker down and do deep work, free from any interruptions whatsoever, as compared to later in the day when inevitably there is always something competing for your attention, especially when you are working from home. Not only is deep work in the mornings inherently rewarding, it is also therapeutic and meditative, as deep work by its very nature pulls you into the present moment and keeps you in a focused state for a long time.
Habit #4: Mindful Walking
I began a daily practice of walking when we first went into lockdown as I wanted some physical activity, and more importantly, some semblance of being outside and close to nature. This very quickly became one of the most nourishing activities I begin my day with.
In the Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz talk about the four main sources of energy each of us needs to show up more fully: mental, physical, emotional and spiritual. Walking, for me, is a source of all 4.
It gives me emotional energy as it’s a daily ritual I engage in with my son every morning. It gives me mental energy, as I listen to my favorite podcasts while walking, and get all kinds of creative insights in the process. Plus, it gives me the time and space to think about my life, my goals and my priorities more deeply. It gives me physical energy with numerous benefits to my overall health. And, finally being out in nature, and connecting with nature mindfully with all of my senses, nourishes my spirit and gives me spiritual energy.
As Neil Pasricha shares in the Happiness Equation, just three 30-minute brisk walks a week can measurably improve your levels of happiness, and even facilitate recovery from clinical depression.
Habit #5: A Daily HIIT workout
Normally, I would work out with a trainer 3-4 times a week at home or at the gym. For the first half of this year, this was difficult to do. However, I wanted to continue to maintain some kind of strength training regimen, but I don’t usually have sufficient will power, and often even the time, to work out on my own for long stretches of time.
Enter Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and his book, Feel Better in 5.
I got inspired by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee’s ideas on breaking your daily workout into 3 small workouts of 5 minutes each sprinkled throughout the day, rather than doing them in one big chunk of time. I began with just 25 sit-ups at one point in the day, 25 supported push-ups at another, and 25 jump squats at yet another.
After several weeks of this, I now combine all three into a single high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout at the end of my morning walk, still no longer than 15 minutes, of 100 sit-ups, 75 supported push-ups and 100 jump squats, all in sets of 25 each. This way I’m able to target all 3 major muscle groups (upper body, lower body and my core), and by doing it as a HIIT workout, I get all the benefits of a longer-duration exercise.
Habit #6: Guarding my mental space by constraining my choices
I have been on a complete shopping fast since June 2019, which means for all of 2020, I did not buy any physical products for myself – no clothing, no shoes, and no accessories. This originally began as an exercise in sustainable living, but the biggest impact of this constraint has been freeing up my precious mental space that was previously taken up by hours spent browsing on Instagram.
The most precious asset we have is our attention. I’m constantly looking for ways in which I can guard my attention, by limiting choices that ultimately add little value to my life – from limits on what I buy, to limits on when I eat (more on that below), to limits on my time on social media.
Fewer choices mean faster decision-making freeing up valuable time, and fewer overall decisions in the day mean making better decisions as you can spend more time deliberating on the decisions that matter.
Habit #7: Daily learning, and upgrading my thoughts
The average person has up to 65,000 thoughts in any given day, and close to 95% are the same every single day, which means on any given day, we are not optimizing the creative potential of our brain.
Not only that, the same thoughts lead to the same set of actions, which then create the same results in our life. In other words, thinking the same way leaves us with little hope for any kind of meaningful change in our lives.
One of the most powerful ways to upgrade your thinking is to constantly expose yourself to new ideas, and to learn new things. This year, I committed to devoting more time to learning and to reading more books. Fortunately, the time freed up from commuting in Bangalore traffic each day meant I had a minimum of two hours each day, which I could devote to reading, listening to podcasts, and taking new courses.
Doing this consistently each day and each week meant that I managed to read 35 new books this year, as opposed to other years when I didn’t approach this goal with the same kind of resolve and would average only 10-12 books in a given year.
The quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. If you are constantly exposing yourself to new thoughts, new ideas, and new ways of looking at the world, it can have a powerful effect on the overall quality of your life.
Habit #8: Prioritizing small wins and consistency over perfection
There are many times when an attachment to perfection has held me back in life from doing things that would move me forward. I wouldn’t share an idea until it was fully formed in my head. I wouldn’t start a new initiative at work unless I felt fully ready to do so. Heck, I wouldn’t even post an update on social media until it sounded perfect.
Over the last few years, and this year in particular, I have been challenging myself to let go of this crippling attachment to perfection. This is still a work in progress, but two key shifts that are helping are: 1) Focusing on small wins, and b) Focusing on consistency.
Let me share two small examples.
One, when the pandemic first began, the thought of home schooling my son was a huge source of anxiety, also because my son was struggling with many of the essential skills like reading and writing. I knew the only way I could get through the year is by focusing on small goals, and doing things repeatedly. I began with doing just one small page of writing with him a day, but we would do it every single day, and before we knew it, he was making considerable progress.
Two, this year I committed to making more video content for work. Again, to stop myself from being held back by perfection, I told myself I would only put out bite-sized videos, no more than 3 minutes in duration, but I would put them out every single week as a weekly #MindfulMonday video. There have been many weeks when the perfectionist in me would cringe and not want to not publish a given video, but because consistency has mattered a lot more to me, and showing up was more important than showing up perfectly, I would publish them anyway.
Oddly, by lowering my standards of what I can do and seek to do, I have ended up doing a lot more than I originally thought was possible, and in the process elevated my standards to go after even bigger goals.
“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” – Chinese Proverb
Habit #9: Mindful eating, and syncing with circadian rhythms
Food has been the one of the biggest sources of comfort for many of us this year. In fact, some of my favorite memories this year are of cooking with my spouse in the kitchen, especially during lockdown. We would put on old Bollywood music and just enjoy the process of singing, dancing and cooking together.
What has allowed me to optimize my health this year without placing too many restrictions on what I eat is focusing on when I eat instead. There is a growing body of research which suggests that when we eat in alignment with our natural circadian rhythms – eating our first meal of the day after sunrise and eating our last meal of the day by sunset – we optimize our metabolism and significantly fortify our immune system as we give our body adequate time to rest and recover between meals. I usually eat my first meal around 8/8:30am, and my last meal around 6pm.
Not only that, when we make the first meal the heaviest and the last meal of the day the lightest, as ancient wisdom also suggests, you wake up with much greater energy, focus and mental clarity the next morning.
(For more on syncing with circadian rhythms, please check out any of Satchin Panda’s TEDx talks or his book, The Circadian Code.)
Habit #10: Mindful pauses, and savoring the small moments
There were very few “big things” to look forward to this year – no big events, gatherings, or vacations that we normally spend our time anticipating and relishing. All we had was the sameness of each day, day in and day out.
Still, each ordinary day also bring us several small and fleeting moments of joy, which we typically miss because the mind quickly moves on from them. These small moments typically don’t register in the mind because given the evolutionary negativity bias of the mind, the mind is much more prone to look out for and remember the negatives in our day. However, if we only choose to slow down to not just notice but also to savor the small moments, we realize we get the same level of happiness from these fleeting moments sprinkled throughout the day as we would from the big moments in our lives.
And so, I routinely pause to enjoy these small moments – from my first cup of coffee that I enjoy in silence in the morning, to the loving embrace of my son and my spouse, to the warmth and comfort of my bed at the end of the night, knowing that I am going to bed feeling healthy and safe.
As we train ourselves to mindfully pause multiple times throughout the day to linger in these small moments, not only do we cultivate greater joy, but as Rick Hanson points out in his book Resilient, we wire ourselves for positive neuroplasticity (shaping the brain for the better) and build the resilience that we need to get through the tougher moments, and that can be a super power in times like these.
The Greek origin of the word character means “the mark left by a chisel.” I believe that chisel is our habits. We shape our character with our habits. By bringing greater intention and awareness to which habits are most likely to serve our highest mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being, each of us has the opportunity to chisel away every day, bit by bit, habit by habit, and create the best version of ourselves.
Very inspiring Bhavna, I completely owe you and Shenomics team for the positive changes in me. Your training’s and articles are very inspiring, impactful and brings new perspective. I’m so glad to be associated with you all. Thankyou so much for creating such an amazing platform!
Loved it! Each habit shared is such a beautiful step to living mindfully and building a sense of well-being. There are a few that I already follow, but you have inspired me to adopt a couple more!