Keeping Habits In Difficult Times (COVID-19 Edition)

From where I’m sitting right now, the world looks bright and shiny. And yet based on the news reports, it’s currently falling apart. COVID-19 is wrecking havoc. I’m only going to talk about one small piece of your life it’s likely disrupting: your habits.

If you’re like me, you had a bunch of systems in place (or were putting in place) to help keep you on task. Now everything has changed. It’s hard to keep your thoughts straight, much less manage your day to day activity.

During this (and other) turbulent times, how are you supposed to keep those good habits you’ve spent years developing?

No Need For Punishment

There’s a school of thought that’s a big fan of punishment, and I don’t mean in a kinky way. It sets up consequences for certain behaviors, even if–as the saying goes–the punishment doesn’t fit the crime.

This mentality certainly filters into my own thinking from time to time. I won’t comment (right now) whether it makes any sense in other scenarios, but for habits, it does more harm than good.

Let me give you a real life example. I’ve been working for the past few months to lose weight. I’ve developed some good habits around eating right and exercising, and have found some success.

With COVID-19, though, I’m stuck at home with children who WON’T STOP ASKING ME FOR THINGS! All those triggers I used to have to keep me on task–packing lunch, keeping healthy snacks in convenient places, stories I would tell myself about junk food–they’ve all been messed up. So I recently baked up a batch of chocolate peanut butter chip cookies. For the kids. Obviously. . .

They were delicious. And I ate way too many of them. Combine that with some other bad habits, and I gained a few pounds.

Now, I have two options.

Option 1: I can punish myself. Mentally berate myself for messing up, which will probably lead me into feeling worse and eating even more of those cookies. I mean, there are four of us in this house. I can’t take them anywhere. And the receipe made 3 dozen!

Option 2: Acknowledge it happened. Maybe figure out a way to make it easier to avoid (see James Clear’s 3rd Law). Then move on!

Figure Out New Habits

Life’s challenges won’t always let you retain your old habits. Shelter-in-Place laws to COVID-19 are likely messing up your routine. Pandemics don’t have a monopoly on this, though. It could be a birth, a death, a divorce, or a million other big and small things that are going to screw it all up.

Let’s say you’ve moved from office working to home working. What sort of things did that office trip trigger? Maybe you woke up at certain time, worked out, ate breakfast, cleaned up, and so on, all before sitting at your desk.

Now, you may find it hard to not be Mr. Toad:

Yes my dude pic.twitter.com/dyxgOWfCia

— K*ren Chee (@karencheee) March 31, 2020

With big changes, our old habits may no longer make sense, and our old triggers may break down. And that’s okay! It’s time to figure out what new things will work in your world, and then adjust your life to get those set up and in place.

And remember, don’t punish yourself if things don’t go right the first time. I need to remind myself of this nearly every day as I struggle to suddenly be a home school instructor as well as keeping the rest of my life running.

Small Things

Big changes, big success, big rewards. That’s what everyone wants. We love the stories of the entrepreneur, actor, athlete, etc. who made it big.

Sometimes that success just happens. But it’s so rare, it might as well not exist.

Instead, it’s the small and simple things that we need to change. Find that tiny difference that can make you better today. When you’ve got that mastered, move on to another tiny change.

If you do enough of these, years down the road you’ll find that you’re miles away from where you started, and more successful than you could have imagined back then.

Even in these difficult times, it’s the tiny steps that will make the difference. And keep you sane while the kids are asking for yet another 4 hours on the computer to do nothing but rot their brains.