Good Habits Have Expiration Dates
By: Anetta Theo
Tags: Lifestyle Management, Habit Building, Flow, Life Lessons, Wellness Tips

Good Habits Have Expiration Dates

by Deagreez from Canva Pro

It might seem like a loss to break a good habit you spent a long time building. At first glance, the whole point of instilling a habit is to create a consistent practice. However, nothing is ever lost; no experience gone to waste. Before you start writing, the person you were is absolutely not the same person you are after you write.

Maintaining Habit Homeostasis

This means that in the short term, the habit has expired. Let me explain. Your body is making trillions of micro-adjustments every second to keep your body in homeostasis. That is how your blood stays at a nearly neutral pH. Without those adjustments, the swings in pH would be detrimental to your survival. Likewise, we have to make micro-adjustments to our habits so that our habits don’t run our energy and wellbeing into the ground. We have to ask ourselves, “am I running my habits, or are my habits running me?”

As you may have read previously, I walk every day, twice per day. However, as I recently added daily writing, it has started to displace my daily walking. The writing was a new thing I added, and now it is affecting my whole routine. While this daily habit is good for me overall, it has put my schedule behind by about 1–2 hours per day.

At first, I continued to walk later in the evening, no matter what. Because that habit is a primary source of grounding and restful sleep. However, yesterday, I had to break my daily practice of walking in the evening because my rest was being compromised, adversely affecting everything else. The walking habit had expired, so I had to break it.

Review Your Habits Constantly

We should constantly be re-evaluating our habits, especially all the healthy ones. Walking every day isn’t good for you if you are doing it at the expense of something else, like sleeping on time. One interesting example I frequently encounter is some version of healthy eating. As a dietitian, I have met many people who decide to eat healthy by cutting out food groups from their diet, like simple carbohydrates. The longer they practice this eating pattern, the better they feel, and they may even lose weight or reverse chronic disease. However, this eventually stops working in the same way, but the habit itself becomes part of their identity, and they cannot see that it affects other aspects of their lives. They are unwilling to give up low-carb eating, even though eating this way may no longer be physiologically healthy for them.

Expired Doesn’t Mean Deleted

It doesn’t mean that if a habit has expired at the moment that you never pick it up again. We live in a quantum universe, so everything we do builds on itself and affects everything else. The name of the game here is to make real-time micro-adjustments to all of your daily routines, practices, thoughts, and habits.

The season of your life and time of year will also affect your ability to go for a walk every day. I know that I will grow old and perhaps wear out some hip cartilage one day, and I will have to figure out what to do instead of walking. But until then, I listen in the present to signals my body sends me from moment to moment and make necessary adjustments, just like my cells do to keep homeostasis.