This past year, COVID has thrown a lot of people out of routine. Habits can all the more supportive as a point of grounding! A friend of mine told me about “Atomic Habits,” by James Clear, and it enhanced my life more than I expected! Clear offers worksheets on his website that accompany his book. I downloaded them, but haven’t spent time with them, but the book still proved useful in making some habits.

Even without setting habits intentionally, I found two of them naturally emerge and stick. The benefit of simply reading the book brought the topic into mindfulness; I’ve found this true with other productivity books as well. By engaging with the material, I feel inspired. It surprised me how immediate the addition of these actions were! The habits are small, easy, and create an immediate sense of reward. These qualities naturally sustain them. I now have a more welcoming experience as I enter the bedroom, because the bed is made. When I leave the bedroom in the morning, I feel accomplished, in only a handful of minutes! I’ve built motivation to keep racking up the ‘wins’ and maybe even confident enough to tackle some harder tasks.

Clear’s book addresses the role and interplay of identity in habits, which is an astute and useful reminder. It refreshingly takes the habit out of the realm of success or failure (and therefore pressure and shame). In this case, habit tracking apps might have added to a sense of drudgery, and cost me an additional benefit. Instead of introducing a measure to judge my discipline, maintaining these habits gets to be a form of self-love. I now perform daily acts of service to myself and honor the commitment I’ve made, and that brings me joy.

In these tiny ways of aligning my actions with my desired identity, I’m saying I’m worthy of the quality of life the habits offer. Cutting corners can be easy, and when it happens in too many arenas, you lose the shape of life you intended. There are some days where self care feels harder, where life brings daunting challenges. Useful habits won’t prevent that, but they can help build some resiliency to managing big stress, because you’ve built in a system to remind you, “You matter.“

Have you read “Atomic Habits”? If so, what was your experience? Let’s keep talking about it and keeping our habits in focus! I’ll post an update about habits that didn’t stick so easily in the future (unless keeping up blogging is one of them ;) !