Not one week after saying I needed to form a habit journal more, I was going to let it slide.
I was in our bedroom, sitting in my chair at about 1:15 AM with my phone doing Wordle and Connections. (How many bad habits can you count there?)
I really should get my journal and write something in it.
But it's downstairs in my backpack.
Well, maybe I'll catch up tomorrow.
You really shouldn't. You're going to undo the habit you started.
It'll be fine.
NO IT WON'T. GET OFF YOUR BUTT AND GET THE JOURNAL AND WRITE SOMETHING.
So, yeah, I summoned the fortitude to convince myself to go downstairs to pick up a book and bring it back upstairs.
So this is the sad state of my resolve. I was debating with myself about going down one flight of stairs and up again. At least did the right thing on this not-at-all difficult decision.
It was an easy practice I set out to do …
James Clear's Third Law for creating a good habit is to make it easy to do the good habit.
When I set out to journal more, I didn't say that I was going to journal for two pages, or even one page, or even half a page.
Just a few bullets each day. I didn't even demand complete sentences of myself.
I could get that done in two minutes if I wanted to, or even less.
It was an easy practice.
… yet I was still finding excuses not to do it
We can be excuse factories if we let ourselves. A part of us is content with the way things are.
Some people have real problems facing them, like missing limbs or cancer (or both).
A journal on a different floor of my admittedly very nice house isn't even an inconvenience.
But here I was, talking myself out of expending a few calories to get it.
If I needed evidence as to why I wasn't going where I wanted to in life, there it is.
Also there are the “barriers” to walking on the treadmill
Last Christmas (December 2022) we bought ourselves a fairly high-end treadmill. It was November 2023 before I began walking on it with any regularity.
The reason? The power switch was on the back near the floor. I talked myself out of turning the thing on because it was painful getting down on the floor and back up again.
I got around that “barrier” by realizing that it would go to sleep after a few minutes, and I just needed to remove the magnetic safety kill switch to wake it up again.
I thought this was the beginning of a good habit … until my wife started putting up a barrier to keep our dogs out of that area of the living room because they liked to pee there. Well darn it I can't get over there now was my fresh excuse for not walking on the treadmill.
One pitiful excuse after another.
I'll journal about these excuses to sap their power
I'm confident that I'm part of the way toward quitting the habit of making lame excuses for abandoning my efforts to form habits: I'm recognizing the weak excuses I make to myself.
The problem I face now is that I accept the weak excuse, and I'm letting myself down because I know I'm accepting the excuse.
My journal is a good place for recording two aspects of these excuses:
1. observations about the inner dialogue
A few sentences dedicated to describing the context of the excuse help to define it and the barriers, perceived or otherwise, that make it appealing (which I don't want).
2. implementation intentions
This is another James Clear phrase from his First Law of creating a good habit.
Having identified the excuse I'm making, and the barriers, I can write statements that define what I'll do when these situations come up:
“When I settle in before going to bed, I'll write a few successes in my journal. If it's somewhere else in the house, I'll find it.“
“When I get home from work, I'll go back to the treadmill and walk for at least 5 minutes. If the dog barrier is in place, I'll move it out so I can get back to the treadmill.”
And so forth. By writing this down it will help to remind myself to do it in the moment.