Hello Hivers. An incredible book that I read a while ago is Atomic Habits by James Clear. This post won’t be a comprehensive book review. Instead, it’s about a thought that the book triggered in me.
The basic premise of Atomic Habits is that the small actions we do repeatedly become habits. These habits form the foundation of our life. Habits build the foundation of our success, our personality, our sense of self, and ultimately become our fate. When you understand this you can make it work for you by trying to improve 1% every day with small habits.
I highly suggest reading the book if this idea intrigues.
While thinking about habits, I thought about energy. Not magical energy you use to throw fire balls, but the metabolic energy needed to accomplish stuff.
Do you ever run out of energy for a habit? Probably not. A habit is something you do without thinking,
and sometimes unintentionally. If you do something enough times for it to become a habit, you will
likely always have the energy to do that activity. It’s almost like we have unlimited energy for our habits.
Forming a habit is the easiest thing to do if you follow the technique from Atomic Habits. Let’s say you
want to create a habit of going to the gym. What most people do when they join a gym is they go once,
work out real hard, and then never go again. Why do they do this? They do this because working out
creates soreness and requires a lot of energy. When exercise isn’t a habit, the pain and energy cost is
too discouraging to continue.
The technique to overcome this is to first build the habit of waking up and going to the gym. When people want to create an exercise habit, they often overlook the logistics of working out. It takes a lot of effort to wake up, get dressed, drive to the gym, and still feel motivated enough to exercise.
If you’re starting from absolute ground zero, the first step of building an exercise habit is to just go to
the gym. Go to the gym and then leave. Go to the gym, maybe walk around a little bit, then go home. Do
this on all the days that you want to work out. Because this is an easy task, you will burn the habit of
going to the gym into your nervous system. What a great foundation to work off?
Obviously, just going to the gym won’t get you in shape. Eventually you will want to exercise when you’re there. But the hardest part of walking through the door won’t be a problem. The next step would be to create habits for exercises.
Let’s say Monday is your upper body day. You could create a habit of
doing 10 pushups, or 10 bench presses with light weights on those days. Then on your leg day you can do 10 squats. On your cardio day you can run for 10 minutes on the treadmill.
Your effort level will steadily increase once these activities become a habit.
You can see now how creating a habit is easy, and once something is a habit you have unlimited energy to do those activities.