You Need Good Habits. Here Are 6 to Get You Started.

Maybe I’ve had an advantage in cultivating good habits that contribute to my resilience. I grew up, you see, in Connecticut—nicknamed “the land of steady habits.” Like other New Englanders, people there pride themselves on, and count on one another for, their constancy and reliability—core traits of people we might describe as possessing “Yankee grit.”

Whether you’re in the north, south, east, or west, your day-to-day life depends on your good habits. They are essentially your routines—such as going to work, fixing meals, and washing laundry. If you don’t cultivate good habits like these, you face such negative consequences as being fired, going hungry, or wearing soiled clothing.

Learning to live with resilience is also a matter of cultivating good habits. These habits, or routines, provide the framework for a life lived with positive energy and emotional strength.

Bees routinely visit my balcony in their pollen-gathering.

John-ManuelAndriote/photo

Here are six good habits to consider cultivating, if you haven’t already incorporated them into your life:

1. Develop a morning routine. My own long-time morning routine includes grinding coffee beans and brewing a press-pot of coffee, weeding out the latest load of junk email, and then reading the morning’s news in the four online newspapers I subscribe to. My job is remote, so I check for any work-related emails. I look at Facebook and a few other websites. At some point, I eat breakfast. Then, finally, I shower, shave, and dress—marking the line between “morning” and the rest of the day. By then, I feel fully awake, up-to-date, and ready to see how the rest of the day unfolds.
2. Be grateful. Nothing dispels negativity faster than focusing on all the things you are grateful for. And, as I have found, it’s possible even when circumstances seem bleak to find more than one thing for which you’re grateful. If you have good health, you are already blessed. Did you have food to eat for breakfast? There’s something else. The circle grows larger the more you think about all the things, and people, contributing to keeping you going.
3. Refresh your soul in nature. Even if it’s just a matter of stepping outside to feel a few minutes of sun on your face, give yourself the gift of time spent in the great outdoors. Personally, I enjoy hiking in the woods. It’s a great way to be mindful and focused when your thoughts may have been scattered or anxious. Focusing your sight on the trail in front of you—so you don’t tumble down the side of a hill, for example—is an effective way to shift your energy away from something that may be troubling you.
4. Speak kindly about yourself, to yourself and others. Do you berate yourself for making a mistake? Stop it! Instead, show yourself the same compassion you (hopefully) show others. Give yourself room to be human. Switch out your negative self-talk (“I’m so stupid!”) to positive self-talk that supports your efforts to change and grow (“Oops!”).
5. Exercise! One of the very best, and longest-running habits I have cultivated is exercising and working out. I first joined a gym (Back Bay Racquet Club in Boston) in 1982. With a few gaps in time in the past 41 years, I have very consistently stuck with working out. I’m coming up on a full year next month since I joined LA Fitness here in Atlanta and began swimming almost a mile three or four times a week. I like the reward for my efforts and feeling good when I look in the mirror at nearly 65 years old. For the most part, I feel good, too, when I visit my doctor and see normal readings on all my vital checks and balances.
6. Sleep! We’re conditioned in our work-driven culture to look skeptically at sleep and those who prioritize the recommended seven to nine hours. But it’s important to understand that your body, and your brain in particular, requires sleep to recharge and refresh itself. Not giving the brain the time it needs for its nightly housecleaning has been shown to correlate to a greater risk for dementia. The hours you spend sleeping are an excellent investment in your health and resilience.

So, how do you go about cultivating all these good, healthy habits if you aren’t already practicing them? There’s the key word: practicing. You develop habits that become routines by routinely choosing to prioritize and pursue them over other options that might be available. As clinical psychologist Evan Parks, Psy.D., put it here in Psychology Today in 2022, we only create the change we need to get us where we want to go when we change our motivation from “should” to “must.”

Parks describes working in the pain rehabilitation field, where people regularly must choose between developing the new daily habits they will need—such as strength training, stretching, endurance training, or breathing exercises—to function at the best level they can, or potentially remaining permanently handicapped in some way. “Feeling that we should do something rarely results in lasting change,” says Parks. “Being clear about why we need to change and having effective strategies to follow are key to forming new habits that endure and shape your life.”

Keep before your mind an image of what you or your circumstances would look like, what change there would be—can be, will be—if you choose to give priority to your healthy new habit. Accumulating good habits, healthy routines and routinely healthy ways of behaving and living in general is a sure way to build the confidence you need to face the world, and the good health you want to let you live your best possible life.