9
votes
What healthy habit has made a difference for you?
Any habit, related to any area of health.
What is the habit?
How has it helped you?
How easy/difficult has it been to keep up?
Any habit, related to any area of health.
What is the habit?
How has it helped you?
How easy/difficult has it been to keep up?
Buying an alarm clock so I can leave my phone in the other room when I go to bed. It's a very striking change because the first two hours are you mentally reaching for the phone every thirty seconds, demonstrating perfectly why it's such an important change to commit to.
In general, I think all my healthiest habits can be summed up as "having a routine." It's unexciting, but waking up early, eating breakfast every day, having a designated time to do stretching and practice mindfulness, writing every day, cooking all my own meals, going to bed early -- the impact of each thing is small but they really add up; likewise the impact of each day is small but as long-term habits the benefits cannot be understated.
My bedtime routine enforces proper sleep!
The routine takes a whole hour so I can't just go to bed whenever I feel like, I have to plan going to bed. This means I start the routine even if I'm not tired. The benefit of the routine is that by the end of it, my brain knows its bed time, and I get tired.
Everything is easier with routines, no thinking, just doing.
Making a fresh, hot breakfast every morning.
Cycling.
Crafting - mainly knitting and crochet.
Putting the effort in to create, maintain, and support friendships long term.
It is absolutely my dream to be a person who does this (I love breakfast food so much too...), but I struggle so hard to get out of bed at all in the mornings if I'm not rushing to get to something scheduled. Do you have any advice on how to make yourself turn this into a habit? Or does this sort of thing come more naturally to you?
Not Hobofarmer but my also ADHD advice is to aim low. Like, really low. Buy those packaged oatmeal pouches and begin with hot water + oatmeal + fruit that's already dehydrated in the pouch. When you're feeling fancy and the habit has formed, add your own additional fixings like apple bits, fresh or frozen (defrosted) fruit, cinnamon etc. They can also be a big bag of quick oats pre-divided with your desired amount of sugar as well.
Another aim low hot breakfast is fried/ scrambled eggs. Eat by themselves or between two slices of bread if you need carbs.
Edit: because my flavour of ADHD runs counter to being able to form/maintain routines, I benefit from shelf stable and already-in-fridge options so they don't go to waste when I stop, and can restart easily again.
This is basically how I got into the habit. Started with cold cereal, worked my way up to oatmeal, then rolled oats, then actually cooking -- eggs, sausage, mushrooms, whatever. There was a period where it seemed like we were eating freshly baked biscuits and gravy multiple times a week, which can be quite detrimental to your diet I should add! Nowadays I usually prep and freeze breakfast burritos in bulk instead of cooking in the morning, and reheat them while my tea steeps, which fits perfectly into the daily routine, but gradually working your way up in terms of effort will allow you to find out what levels of effort work for your mornings.
Honestly I think "really low" for me is "not in bed at 14:00" at this point...
I think my bigger ADHD issue here is the "getting started" part, as opposed to the complexity of the breakfast. I love a scrambled/fried egg, so getting there is success for me! But I have trouble actually initiating the "get out of bed and do morning stuff" process, even just making coffee. It's too easy to stay in bed on my phone and doze back off. I think probably being unemployed and not having a set schedule atm is not helping on that front.
It was absolutely not natural to me! I used to go to a Dunkin Donuts for a hot bagel every day, or Starbucks for a breakfast sandwich. I stopped being able to afford that, which turned into a big motivator for me to try something else. I began in the weekends, and started simple. Toast, breakfast sausage, and scrambled eggs. These were simple things I could put together with minimal effort while getting lunches packed for the family as well (on weekdays). I practiced it in the weekend so it could be automatic on weekdays. As I got comfortable with this, I started trying new things (again, always trying novel ideas on the weekend).
My go-to breakfast now that I barely have to think about is chorizo with potato, onion, and pepper and a sunny side up egg on top. I flavor it with chili paste and garlic. It sounds like a lot but it's effortless for me - I set it up on the stove top and spend my time while it cooks getting lunches ready, putting dishes away, or doing other morning things to get ready for the day.
This is coming from someone with ADHD - it is 100% possible for anyone!
Trying it just on the weekends is a good idea, though not super applicable in my current schedule-less situation... I'll keep this in mind for starting the habit, though!
This has been the hardest yet most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. And it has paid off in spades for me also. I don’t know what forming that habit looked like for you, but for me, the beginning of it was SO uncomfortable at times, I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep it up. Definitely worth every uncomfortable moment.
My best healthy habit is keeping a water bottle at my side at all times. It's become very natural to reach over if I'm ever dehydrated, or looking for a way to cool down.
20 years ago, I'd have a Coke in my hand at all times. It was an unending deluge of empty calories. If I hadn't killed that habit, I'm sure I'd be in far worse physical shape than I am now. Keeping a water bottle nearby helped substitute that oral fixation and wean me off the sugar.
Other considerations:
These have been huge for me
I posted up above in a reply about forming habits to establish and maintain friendships. This has done a lot for my mental health. I spent a good portion of my life feeling like no one liked me. Somewhere in my early 40s, I started creating a a life of isolation. It was like well, since the world doesn’t like me, I’ll just check out from it. I’ll stop wanting any of you. Over the next decade I went to incredibly dark places inside my mind. The self loathing, the hopelessness, the pointlessness of my life, the lack of love, the unworthiness, and the suicidal ideation and more were constant companions. Then I added alcohol into the mix and things got darker.
So what happened? One day I get a text from this woman who in retrospect I realize had been trying to make friends with me for about five years, off and on. This particular day she was asking me if I wanted to go for a walk and catch up. The thing is we didn’t know each other well enough to catch up, but for some reason I said yes. It’s odd that I said yes, because at the time I thought she and I were nothing alike. I thought that the only reason she had ever reached out to me was because she was a nice person, not because there might be something about me she found attractive in a potential friendship. I mean this woman was a scientist and well known artist, and super rich, and worldly, and had a tight knit family, and belonged to different clubs, and held dinner parties, and well, she had everything. I on the other hand was uneducated, and couldn’t shake of my white trash roots, and was a former sex worker, and had spent time incarcerated, and had delved heavily into drugs and the seedier side of life. Why the heck would she want anything to do with me? I felt like a charity case. But anyway, I said yes, and we went for a walk. And it was terrible. The entire time I felt uncomfortable. When we were getting back to our cars, she asked me if I’d like to walk again the following week, and for some reason I said yes.
My life was blowing up at this time. I felt like I was at a crossroads: make changes or watch my life get even more miserable. The problem was I didn’t know how, and I was sick of the hope that comes with trying. Hope was like this trap that would lead me in only to have another failure close in around me. But I tried anyway. I just started doing the opposite of whatever I had been doing. I wanted to say no to something, I said yes. I wanted to say yes to something, I said no. So I said yes to walking with this woman.
After about 5 months worth of walks and visiting with her at her house, I still didn’t know why the heck she kept asking me around. One day she says we need to talk and proceeds to tell me how I’ve hurt her feelings by never initiating contact. She feels like she’s doing all the work in the friendship. I don’t know what to say to that other than the truth. I tell her I’m afraid of bothering her, and that I am unsure that she likes me. I ask her if we’re friends. I tell her I haven’t had a friend in decades if ever and I don’t know what friendship looks like or how to be a friend. I start crying. She tells me, yes, she does like me that’s why she keeps reaching out to me. She tells me that she doesn’t have many friends because she gets tired of putting in unreciprocated effort and endless superficiality.
That was the beginning of me realizing that if I wanted people in my life, I had to stop letting my fear drive all my actions. My brain is fully capable of lying to me. So I started reaching out to her and putting effort into finding cool places for us to walk. I pushed through the fear of feeling like I had nothing to offer. I was knowledgeable about things she was interested in like gardening, plant propagation, sea life, birds, and the like. I stopped being afraid of sharing these things with her in fear that I would come off as a know it all.
And then I started reaching out to other people. Some of those people were people I had ghosted years ago, some of them people I had met recently. Some of those people didn’t reply in kind. At times I’ve felt like I was putting in the majority of the effort, and I’ve come to realize that it’s okay to do that and other times I can let them go because the effort isn’t worth it. I’ve realized that I don’t have to hang out with people just because they give me attention, that people aren’t better than me, we’re all just people.
And it has been a life changing habit. The habit looks like this: once or twice a week I text a few people, and I call a couple. I pick up the phone when someone calls me if I’m not working or sleeping. A couple times a month I try to ask someone to do something with me (they don’t have to say yes), and if I’m asked to do something, I give at least one yes. I respond to texts. I’m willing to try new things and go new places, even if I think I won’t like it. I’m forming new likes and dislikes that are based on the person I am today, not on the person I was 10, 20, or 30 years ago.
I don’t have a busy social life. I don’t want one. But what I do have is connection. I have a couple intimate friends, and a few people who I enjoy spending time with if our schedules align. People text me and share their joys and sorrows and mundanes. And I do likewise. I have a couple of telephone friends, and honestly talking on the phone is better than binging another show I’m just pushing through because there’s nothing better to do. I no longer have this aching loneliness that had burdened me most of my life. I’m not stuck with the unreliable narrator that was my mind every single second of every single day. And the narrator has started being more truthful now that I’m paying closer attention.
That was a huge wall of text. It sort of got away from me.