Fight 4 Happiness

I have been wrangling again with two habits which I know bring me little happiness and yet I find myself habitually stuck with. Social media and the news. Particularly Facebook and BBC News to be exact. I find myself filling so many minutes in my day, doom scrolling. The spaces in between get consumed by loosing myself in a desire to risk assess or longing to connect. I seek both and achieve neither.

Realistically the want to “stay on top of the news” is more than pointless. The things I read are often things I can do little about and realistically I don’t take any different action when I read about them. I just find it heart breaking. And as much as I like to see what my friends and family are up too that sense of connection is some how lacking. I don’t get the same joy when I catch up with someone directly as I do reading about their lives like a spectator.

So I am back on a mission again to reduce my time in these activities and increase the time on things I love. Here’s are some key thoughts to help us all achieve the habits we want…

Accept we will be here again…

Creating new habits and breaking old ones is hard. We often set ourselves the expectation that we will just decide to do something and we should succeed first time, second time, or third time lucky! But let’s gets real try 66 days on average to create a new habit.

https://psychcentral.com/blog/need-to-form-a-new-habit-66-days#At-Least-2-Months-to-Form-a-New-Habit

And that is just the average for some of us creating habits can take much longer. Skipping a day here or there won’t impact the habit forming process and yet we often take a single set back as a reason to give up and so are left the start all over again. If you experience a set back for a day or two accept it, don’t beat yourself up. Reset your desire and go for it again.

Make it easy or hard…

Make the things you want to do easy and the things you don’t want to do hard. Sounds simple right. It is and all you need to do is apply some thinking in advance to work with your goals…If you don’t want to eat junk food don’t keep any in the house. If you want to go for a run, get your gear ready the night before.

Fill your time with good rather than cut out the bad…

This is a newer lesson for me which has had a huge impact. When I had a goal previously I would apply lots of focus on the negative side. E.G I don’t want to spend as much time on social media. So I would focus on reducing time on the platforms. I have learnt it is much more effective to focus on the positive. I do want to write more blogs and more poetry (if I do that I will have less time for social media by default). This focus on the positive makes me feel more positive and when I feel good about something I am more likely to commit to it.

Try shifting the focus of one of your goals to the positive and monitor the impact. And no loosing weight is not a positive goal, nurturing your body with great food and perhaps enjoying a regular walk is positive.