Breaking Habits One at a Time

Affirmation: I go to sleep at 10, I awake at 6 feeling rested and rejuvenated

I have been thinking a lot about habits. More specifically breaking out of them. During most of September and all of October I concentrated on an affirmation (I eat when I am hungry and stop when I am satisfied). It made a huge difference for me in determining when and if I should eat. It transformed how and when and what I eat, particularly snacks. It has been much easier to say no, simply because I am telling myself the truth about hunger. If I am not hungry, and I felt like eating and asked myself the question "am I hungry?" it made the next logical step easier; "what is this wanting to eat really about". Am I perfect on this? No. I still eat sometimes when I am not hungry, but now I know why. And most of the time I counter it with dealing with what is going on instead of eating.

As I have been thinking about how this changed me, I have also been thinking about how it happened. Namely that I was persistent with this affirmation, changing my behavior until it has become second nature to ask myself these questions; Am I hungry? Am I satisfied? If I am not hungry, what is really going on? It took a little over a month to really become part of my automatic lifestyle.

So, most say that it takes 30 days to break a habit and/or create a new one. I have read a lot about how much easier it is to break a habit if you replace it with a new one. Not sure that is always a good thing, guess it would depend on what you replace the old one with. But I have also been thinking about why diets fail and when change succeeds. I think that, for me at least, all diets have failed because there is too much change too soon. Your body, mind and emotions can't handle all that change at once. You get discouraged, you quit. This past year has been about making small changes one at a time. The changes that I have concentrated on one at a time until they became part of my life have stayed with me. The times I have tried to make sweeping changes all at once didn't last. So I am wondering if it is more beneficial to think about making one change, concentrate on it until it becomes habit and then go on to another. All the while keeping each habit a part of my life until it really becomes ingrained in my very being.

So thinking about this, I have been thinking about the things in my life that are keeping me from successes in this journey to health. The first that was glaring has been that I have been extremely tired and fatigued for a very long time. Doc says that there is no medical reason. So I looked closely at my sleep habits. Doh!! I am a night person so find it annoying to go to bed, but I also work in an early morning world. I had been averaging 4-5 hours of sleep a night, trying to get up early to exercise (failing miserably at it) and fighting sleep at work all day long. So at the beginning of November I decided to chuck everything around getting rest, exercise, pushing myself to get up early, etc and make a promise to get to bed by 10, set my alarm to go off at 6 and let myself wake up on it's own after that (by 7 at least to get to work on time). I also have given up Sunday as a day of rest and rejunivation. I do not do anything stressful, exercise, or work related on this day. If I feel like napping the day away I do. I try to make this a day of self-care and cocooning.

So far it has been amazing. It took about a week to get my body to stop at 10, but I still went to bed every night at that time. I am now able to fall asleep right away, sometimes even before if I am watching TV hehe. I sometimes am still having insomonia, waking in the middle of the night, but now I do not let myself get up and do things, I stay in bed. If I need to I listen to a relaxation tape. But that hasn't happened now for almost two weeks...I usually am able to do some deep breathing and get right back to sleep. Just this week I have been slowly waking up just before the alarm goes off and am usually out of bed by 6:15. And best of all I am feeling human and energized most of the day. I am no longer feeling like I am walking through mud, unless I do not get to bed before 10. I would never have believed that getting 8 hours of sleep would have made such a difference, I have always been able to function on 5-6 hours a night, even less. But I just can't believe the difference. I am finding that I don't feel like eating as much either. I think that I ate when I was sleepy in an effort to stay awake.

SO...I plan to finish off the month with concentrating on getting to bed at 10 and letting the alarm go off at 6 and getting out of bed when I feel awake, but by 7 for sure. Next month I will continue this, but get out of bed at 6. In January I plan to add exercise in the morning. I felt that before I added exercise I needed to create a healthy sleep pattern and make sure that I was rested. As it was, when I would exercise I would feel worse, more drug out than energized. Who would have thought something as simple as getting more sleep would change my whole world? And would anyone have thought that getting enough sleep would help you not eat? Well maybe some would, but I sure didn't.

I am going to continue this throughout the new year. I may even plan out the whole year from the beginning...but then again it may be better to take each month as it comes seeing what area needs to change. But I know that taking one step at a time fills me with hope and feels like it has taken a lot of pressure to change everything all at once. Maybe as some of the "biggies" of habits change I can do more than one a month, but I am not planning on it. I know that this means that the visual results (meaning actual poundage lost) may not be as fast as I would like, but I truly believe that the changes will be much more permanent.

I wonder once I get some of the big "physical changes" made into habits: (in no particular order)

1. eat when I am hungry; stop when I am full
2. get to be by 10 pm
3. get up and out of bed by 6 am
4. exercise 20 minutes 6 mornings a week
5. do evening yoga tape 6 evenings a week
6. keep a food log again for a whole year
7. eat only healthy choices (this may evolve into more specifics later)
8. stop junk food all together - including eating on the run
9. eat a healthy breakfast every morning (not MacD's)
10. add weight training into the mix
11. choose salads (ditch the extras that have NaCl & fat)for the nights of having to eat out
12. Pray and visualize and journal every day about this journey

I wonder if I can also work on some of the emotional aspects too. Replace them with healthy habits. This would be

1. affirmations,
2. replacing negative thinking with positive thinking (getting rid of the negative tapes)
3. doing the bible study on who I am in God...what God really thinks of me
4. a word study on food in the Bible
5. replacing self deprecation and criticism with positives
6. finally doing the time line of my life to see the weight issue in context and see the truths

Ok I am not sure what else needs to be on that list, but I am sure as I work through this year it will become apparent to me.