Habit forming.

[owsf2000]

According to my sister, forming a good (or bad) habit takes approximately 21 days. By this she means if you can keep doing something for that long, it'll essentially become a part of your routine and you'll find yourself doing it automatically.

I'm going to try this out to see what happens. First two habits to form will be:

1. Daily exercise. I'm going to start off easy on this one, and try to just do a few pushups and situps each day when I wake up. It won't be making me buff or anything but it will get me into a routine, and hopefully I'll use that to encourage me to expand the routine later.

2. Doing the dishes immediately after eating. I have a problem with letting dishes pile up before I sit down and wash'em all. They're not really dirty mind you. I rinse them in the sink after I'm finished with them but I don't actually wash them and put them back up in the cupboard. Tends to hurt my back to lean over the sink doing a lot of dishes (Why no, I don't have a dishwasher!) so hopefully by doing them as I use them it'll be easier on me.

It's the 24th right now, so I'll report on the results of this on December 15th to confirm if I actually managed to stick with them and then again on Christmas to see how things are progressing afterwards.

Comments

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

#1 is definitely one I need to do as well. It's why I got a Wii Fit (http://kane-magus.livejournal.com/248426.html), though I ended up only sticking with it for a couple of weeks or so. Less than 21 days anyway. If this works out for you, I think I'll try it myself and actually try to stick with it for more than just a week or so. If nothing else, it would make me feel as if my purchase of the Wii Fit were justified at least. ^^; Maybe I'll try to get back into Wii Sports Resort as well, though I haven't really touched it since my family left a few weeks ago.

Aside from non-Wii related exercise, there's still just the 40 minutes or so (combined) of walking I do to and from work and that's probably how it will remain... >_>

[rabbitucker.livejournal.com]

"21 days" is a general rule of thumb for habit-forming and habit-replacement taken from twelve-step programs. Also, so says Melody Beatty (http://www.amazon.com/Weeks-Conscious-Contact-Meditations-Connecting/dp/1568388802/) as well.

In my experience, it works pretty well, but they can easily be replaced with bad habits of procrastination and the like, which can form after 21 days themselves.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Indeed. That's why it says 21 days to form habits - good or bad. If you can get into the habit and it forms more or less into routine it would be easier to avoid the vile procrastination. (Or at least that's what I'm hoping!)

I'm also going to be adding in a "No buying shit from the vending machines at work!" as an extra goal.