Habits: A Way of Being

“The second half of a person’s life is made up of nothing more than the habits he has accumulated in the first half.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is not easy. I have not yet cultivated the habit of writing so here I am, once again, with a Monday morning deadline, challenged to create something of value for you. Although Dostoevsky’s quote may seem a bit grim, we can see that we really are living out our habits and rituals day to day, every day. Understanding this we recognize that cultivating habits aimed in the direction of our health and wellbeing can serve us very well.

How do we do this?

In Atomic Habits by James Clear, he breaks down habit formation into a simple loop and offers four laws to build good habits and break bad ones.

He writes:

1. Make it obvious
2. Make it attractive
3. Make it easy
4. Make it satisfying

As many of you know, daily physical activity and meditation have been part of my daily routine for the greater part of my life. A daily bike commute, rain or shine, a regular running program and consistent meditation practice are habits that have stuck with me through all of life’s ups and downs and often garner compliments from patients and friends that strive to maintain their own personal fitness and well being goals.

However, here is my confession: habits (and the discipline to train them) have had little to do with my experience. I love to do each one of those activities and therefore I never had to develop habits to encourage them. I love to be outside, I love the adventure of discovering a new place to run, and I crave the stillness of sitting in meditation. So while at first glance, it appears that I have well developed habits, the truth is I’ve been lucky enough to stay healthy enough to continue the consistency of these physical pursuits that I love, and therefore don’t require the discipline that we are speaking of.

Writing on the other hand, I have found it is a different thing! And I am here to tell you, that at 9pm on Sunday evening it is no coincidence that habits are what are forefront in my mind, because at this moment the only habit that I can point to that I have regularly established with writing is, yelling at my wife each time she tries to help me with developing some habits to make this process a little less stressful - I’m told this is a bad habit.

However, I truly look forward to applying habits to writing. Rather than focusing on what you want to achieve, focus on what you want to become. Habits are a path not only to identity change, but to a potential positive life change.

A recent conversation I had with Ajay, one of my regular patients comes to mind. Ajay had just received a promotion to become the CEO of a company he has been with for many years. Rather than retiring as he had been considering, he now finds himself with even more responsibilities and demands on his time. Ajay’s primary reason for wanting to retire was to focus more on his health and wellbeing, so we had a challenge. We agreed that his favorite way to exercise is walking and although golf and pickleball are activities he enjoys periodically, we needed to make sure he was walking regularly. In the spirit of cultivating a regular walking habit for Ajay he followed the suggestions listed above and created a habit positive environment this way:

• To make walking obvious: he leaves his shoes in front of his computer where he would otherwise be apt to log on first thing.
• To make it attractive: he walks alone without a phone in a pleasant setting in order to clear his mind.
• To make it easy: he will walk for just a mile on days he isn’t feeling his goal of 5K.
• To make it satisfying: Ajay recognizes how much better he feels with more energy and less pain after a brisk walk.

Learning from Ajay I consider creating potential habits to develop towards my writing. As Clear says in his book, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” I have always admired people who write and have also desired to become a person who writes. Given that here is my personal strategy to become a person who writes:

• To make it obvious: I have begun to carry a three-ring binder notebook wherever I go to cue me to write. The habit of opening the notebook rather than my phone during moments of free time is the hinge.

• To make it attractive: Like many of you I know that anything to do with coffee helps, whether a Nespresso at home or, even better, setting up at a coffee shop can make the experience very attractive.

• To make it easy:  I will just write a single page or 10 minutes of stream of consciousness if I am feeling stuck. Sometimes I will write just a single sentence.

• To make it satisfying: I am grateful to many of you whose kind feedback on my previous newsletters has deepened my satisfaction. Thank you for this.

I invite us to think about the person we want to become and, rather than relying on willpower, design our environments to make good habits easier and bad ones harder. Recently, as I’ve been talking with many of you about habits, a patient said to me that the idea of looking at habits seemed boring. She suggested we think of it as a “way of being” rather than habits. I like that. It reminds me of a thought I’ve had for years: the idea that we are verbs and not nouns. We are all a dynamic process of change and growth rather than a fixed person. It is through our habits and rituals—our way of being—that we can achieve more satisfying and fulfilling lives. Lives that can better serve those around us.