Tag: habits

Normalcy

On 29/01/2025

Already at the end of January. Can’t believe we have a 1/12th of the year gone…!

We’re approaching a time of the year that saw my life turned a bit upside down in 2024. Change is, sometimes sadly, inevitable. In some situations it is sought, but perhaps too often, it’s pushed onto us before we’re ready.

Human beings are nothing if not adaptable. We built our entire species on it and yet, so very often, we go through it only reluctantly. It’s destabilizing, it can be terrifying, and sometimes – only sometimes – it doesn’t end well.

I personally don’t do well with uncertainty. Change I can do, provided a plan can be made to project adaptation in a nearby future. After all, I went from never having left my province, to taking several flights to Northern Europe, where I knew no one other than from the internet, and had only English as a second language to communicate. But a plan was established, and it was the start of a life-changing era.

Some changes are smaller, but no less impactful.

After a terrible year in 2022, I spent most of 2023 recovering mentally, trying to return to what had last felt like normal. When 2024 rolled up, I had what I thought to be a very solid foundation, and the year started up really well, too.

And then significant changes started happening. A switch in supervisors. In work tasks. In sleep patterns. In anxiety. Through all of it, I hung onto what I thought was normalcy – my routine, as much as the lack of sleep allowed. My daily habits. Exercising, seeing people. Eventually I had to take a break, with the intent to find my footing again and build, once again, a new normal.

But as stated previously : life is what happens when you’re busy making plans. Illness and an unexpected departure in the family at the start of autumn shattered my last hopes of returning to normal for the year.

Four months later today, I have come to understand that normal is never something you return to. It’s something you build over and over again. Sometimes the variation is almost imperceptible. But we learn from everything we go through, and those lessons, positive or not, model us into new versions of ourselves.

The normal that held us comfortably suddenly is all angles and bumps, and we have to reshape it, or remain in otherwise inexorable discomfort.

That is something I keep having to remind myself of lately, even now as I still slowly but steadily recover from last week’s norovirus infection. It felt like a wrench thrown in the carefully and precariously constructed pillars of the routines I’ve tried to build again, and as the recovery is taking longer than in previous such instances, it’s frankly annoying.

But, I am nothing if not adaptable.

I’m just also going to complain (to myself) the whole time.

Have a good start to February.

2-minute habits, 5 years later (part 2)

by Laury

On 02/01/2025

In Reflexions

Hello again! Hope you are doing well, a few days into the new year!

Already doing better than 2020 for having a second post up! Let’s go!

The remaining 4 habits that I’ve carried on these past 5 years :

As the term itself is somewhat nebulous, “Self-care” can take many forms, depending on the day. Sometimes it’s a long shower or a bath, socializing, generally making a particular effort to take care of my health, mental or physical, particularly when I’m not feeling like it. Just an extra effort to feel a bit better, every day

Easiest is “Clean” – it’s actually difficult not to complete that one! There is always something to clean, even if I spend most of my day away from my apartment. Tidying a very messy home is my favourite : fairly low effort for a visually satisfying result. Worst is dishes. Can’t stand dishes. Very satisfying to have completed but an utter drag to even get started.

The one that remains hardest, even five years later, is “Meditate”. It is unusual for me not to have something to distract me, mostly from thoughts and feelings. Taking a moment away from that and focusing on the very things that usually overwhelm me is… a pain. Writing this is a clear realization that it’s actually something I need to specifically work on, so I suppose this will be my first task this year.

“Exercise” is the only “daily” that was removed from the list, as its completion became mandatory in another way.

In January 2021, thanks to my workplace’s well-being incentives, I obtained a smart watch in an effort to boost my motivation. Like probably the vast majority of people in the previous year, had become even more sedentary than ever before, and both mental and physical effects were clear.

Still, it took until November that year for the desired effect to properly take hold, and apart from a brief but intense illness in January 2024, exercising has been an uninterrupted daily task for a bit over 3 years! It’s usually walking outdoors or using a stationary bike (allowing me to read while I exercise…!), but it does the very important job of keeping my body in motion.

Despite not being an innate morning person, as the time I dedicated to moving my body increased, I ended up deciding to get up at 5AM. This may seem masochistic to some, it certainly did to me, but once it was clear that exercising after work was far more unpleasant to me than getting up earlier in the morning, the choice was clear. As I’m also the dedicated caretaker of a stubborn feline, this has become a 7-day schedule, and sleeping in is no longer an effective option. This is my life now.

And so, as my smart watch keeps the score, and I record the completion of that task with the length of the physical activity, checking a box was no longer necessary, and said box was removed.

Two lessons from this:

One: Like with the streak of the Duolingo app, having the incentive to see the habit as an ever rising number has proved incredibly gratifying to me. I took good note of that and also applied it to the task I was most concerned about maintaining : creating art. I got up to 227 this year, before a difficult life event had me take a break. By the time I publish this post, it’ll be back up to 70.

Two: Removing “exercising” from the daily checks to be completed, even if it is compelled another way, is the first success of this project. I wanted these to become habits, normal and but important parts of my life, because they genuinely make it better. Not all of them are at that stage yet, and too often I put them off until I can’t, instead of prioritizing them when I have the time and energy. As the hope is for me to end up spending more than the required 2 minutes per activity, that pattern is entirely counterproductive.

That is something I seek to improve upon in these upcoming 12 months. The daily boxes to be checked might remain even once (further) satisfactory habits are achieved (I’ll be honest, it is a very satisfying sight in my records, which in itself is an incentive). But I also know that after five years, I am not yet approaching a level with which I am satisfied, so let’s make it conscious and intentional!

Wishing you a happy start to the new year!

2-minute habits, 5 years later (part 1)

by Laury

On 01/01/2025

In Reflexions

Happy New Year!! May these next months bring you only gentle challenges and the strength to see them through. I think we all deserve it at this point!

While I’ve hung onto this site since, the first (and only other, so far) post on this blog was on January 1st, 2020. We all know what followed (globally).

Despite the obvious (less gentle) challenges of the last couple of years, the “dailies” written about have fortunately not left me. They were not always completed, and they have changed a little bit since, but they remain a good representation of how my day went. A full row also always makes me feel more accomplished.

It started with eight tasks :

Draw, Read, Write, Study, Self-Care, Clean, Meditate, and Exercise.

Today, I’m tackling the first four.

***

“Draw” ended up encompassing any visually creative activity. In the past year, thanks to free art workshops at the Montreal Musée des Beaux Arts, I had the opportunity to try my hand at linocuts among other new activities, and it has definitely become something I’m interested in pursuing further.

“Read” stayed the same, and other than the 2-minute requirement, I decided I wanted it to be from a book – as opposed to articles or online fiction. Longer works help with improving attention span, and mostly focusing on printed works allowed for less screen time. As such, I ended up reading more book in the past five years than I had in the previous ten!

A lot of non-fiction, from the works of Dr Brené Brown, Ali Abdaal, and several memoirs; many graphic novels, such as Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Fine by Rhea Ewing, and Himawari House by Harmony Becker; and some good old written fiction, including catching up with the Temperance Brennan novels by Kathy Reichs, and a personal favourite, This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

There were plans for “Write” to be for this blog, journaling, and some fiction. Obviously, the blog ended up forgone as life happened, as did writing fiction, and the task ended up being mostly journalling. It has helped tremendously with coping with both world and personal events, but I’m looking forward to diversifying its use!

For a long while, “Study” became a daily use of the Duolingo app to maintain some level of proficiency in Finnish when it was published in the summer of 2020. The course was completed in a few months, but once it was, the exercises became quite repetitive and ultimately, unhelpful. One can only translate “koala, koalas” to “koala, koalat” so many times before losing interest.

Instead, in the past year, I’ve taken up an incredibly gratifying activity. I had read Rupi Kaur’s The Sun And Her Flowers, despite not being much of a poetry fan, and enjoyed it very much. When I visited Finland in November 2023, I came across its Finnish translation, and decided to put myself to the task of reading it through. The grammar is now familiar enough to usually allow me to recognize the declension or conjugation of a word and infer its original form, and both a physical dictionary and Wiktionary have been invaluable to make out the words yet unknown to me. My understanding of sentences can be checked and corrected against the original English work, and I’m discovering a lot of equivalent expressions.

I am still incredibly excited when I get the etymology and more of the workings behind the language, and I already have another book lined up when I’m done – though that one is originally in Finnish, and the English version is the translation. A different sort of challenge!

Next up, Self-care, Meditate, Clean, and Exercise!

a well-used copy!

The 2-minute rule

by Laury

On 01/01/2020

In Reflexions

We all have the best intentions with new habits at the start of new phases of our lives, but it’s usually incredibly hard to stick to them, and even sometimes just even summon the will to start. For a species whose #1 quality is adaptability, we decidedly hate change.

Often, the enormity of a task or activity seems insurmountable, or even just unpleasant, even if we are clearly aware that it needs to be done, or that it’s for the best. Starting is usually the worst part, a steep hill to climb, after which the feat’s momentum can actually take us further almost effortlessly.

A few months back I’d stumbled on the concept of the 2-minute rule. It proposes to scale the habit down to a very short, 2-minute activity, which is less daunting, and as such, far easier to get started on. Read a page. Wash a plate and a glass. Do a yoga pose. One doodle.

The past few months have been difficult for me, emotionally and physically, and this new year starting is obviously bringing a renewed hope to set things back into a healthier path. But again: new habits are hard to start, harder to maintain. But not impossible.

Along with newly discovered information about myself, I will be trying to implement 8 small habits into my daily life:

– Draw
– Read
– Write
– Study
– Meditate
– Exercise
– Clean
– Self-care

That might seem a lot, but they will only take 2 minutes each, right? I can doodle while I work. Read on my 15-minute train commute. Same with studying, which I can do on my phone. Write a few sentences at lunch, or after work. In total, that’s only 16 minutes of my day dedicated to improvement.

If I happen to spend more time on them, because I just feel like it, even better! If I do each for 2 minutes and not a second more? It’s fine. At least I showed up, and I reached my goal of spending that exact amount of time on it. Even if it’s a small goal, it still counts, and it still registers in my mind as an achievement, making it easier to keep going in the future.

This was my 2-minute writing task, which obviously took longer. Earlier I meditated (nearly 4 minutes!), read (almost 10!), and cleaned (nearly 15 minutes). That is half of my daily goals in a little over half an hour, and I actually get a full blog post out of it, which is very rewarding.

We live in a world that values productivity above self-care, and it’s frankly toxic. This year I’m learning to understand how my mind and body work, and how I can use that to best identify and fulfill identify their needs.

To 2020!

Pawsma is intrigued by my sitting down and staring at this thing