Nov 30

Nov 30 Create Habits with the Calendar System

Hi, I'm Liz Moser, and I'm a Mayo Clinic Certified Wellness Coach.

What are the habits you want to add or subtract from your life that keeps alluding you despite your best efforts? Or, what's that habit on your nightly checklist you keep circling instead of crossing off?

Well, whether it's meditation, journaling, exercising, or eating more fruits and veggies, what's worked for me is a tool Jerry Seinfeld popularized. His foolproof method to add a habit is his calendar system.

Seinfeld found that what motivates him to write jokes every day is a yearly calendar he hangs on the wall. Every day that he writes jokes, he marks that day with an X. When Seinfeld misses a day, he circles it. Seinfeld stays motivated because he doesn't want to break the chain of Xs. This motivational system appears, at first glance, to be too simplistic to work; however, it's been my ace in the hole habit-building tool.

Seinfeld's system jives with James Clear's writing about habit tracking:

Clear stipulates that habit tracking is powerful because it leverages multiple laws of behavior changes. It makes habits obvious, attractive, and satisfying:

Obvious: The mere act of tracking behavior can spark the urge to change it. Habit tracking keeps you honest; when the evidence is right in front of you, you're less likely to lie to yourself.

Attractive: the most effective form of motivation is progress. When we get a signal that we are moving forward, we become more motivated to continue down that path.

Satisfying: Tracking can be its own reward. It is satisfying to cross an item off your to-do list. Habit tracking keeps your eye on the ball: you are focused on the process rather than the result.

Some points to remember when creating new habits:

Prioritize:

Remember the adage, "If you have more than 3 priorities, you have no priorities."

In other words, stay focused. Perhaps you aren't accomplishing your goal because you have five other more important priorities.

Start small:

You want to systematize before you optimize. Creating the when and where you will perform a habit (I will meditate first thing in the morning in my sauna) Is more important than the length of time.

Add one habit at a time:

Research shows that habit-building works best one habit at a time.

So the history of my calendars:

Several years ago, my morning meditation started to slip. For me, the slow death of a habit is if I start buying into the idea that YES, I can do it later in the day! NO, most likely, I will not! Ha! What happens first gets done, right? The challenge is judiciously choosing what that first action (or first several actions) will be.

Most of my calendar challenges were for ten weeks because ten weeks or 70 days is more than the average of 66 days it takes to create a habit.

Some examples of my calendar challenges are:

February-April 2018: meditate 1st thing in the morning

March-May 2018: 10-minute morning workout/2 different routines. I’ll do a blog on them in the future.

June-August 2018: wake at 5 am and sleep on my back.

June-August 2018: Sauna 1st followed by a quick 10-minute workout routine.

September 2018: 14-day TV Challenge

September-December 2018: No Caffeine challenge. Decreased caffeine amount slowly each week and then six weeks without it.

October – December 2018: increase meditation by 1 minute every week from 10 minutes to 20 minutes

June – August 2019: Read 2 of Dr. Amen's books on brain health. Broke all my rules and made a challenge for multiple behavioral changes: wake at 4 am, exercise 30 minutes per day, NO gluten, soy, and corn.

Have you tried a calendar challenge to assist you with either adding or removing a habit from your life?

Or, have you successfully used another habit building system?

Please let me know! Thanks for reading this, I'm Liz Moser, a Mayo Clinic Certified Wellness Coach. If you have any questions about this blog or if you have any questions about health or wellness, please email me at lizm@lizmosercoaching.com.