Doomsday Habit
We’re all, to one degree or another, creatures of habit. Studies have shown that around 40% of our behavior is repeated daily and automatically. Brushing our teeth, making our beds, the order in which we open the various apps and tabs we use for our work — these activities don’t require a lot of decision-making, because through extreme repetition, they’ve become largely automatic.
We also have our practices: those skill-building, often creative activities that we wish would become habitual, but they haven’t quite reached that point of automation where we just do them, regardless of how we’re feeling or what the weather is like. I’ve tried for years to make my running practice truly habitual, but if it’s raining or too cold or too hot, nine times out of ten I’ll stay inside.
As we begin to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, many of us (myself included) are scrambling to build or rebuild healthy practices that may have gone afield during “the great pause.” My list of practices includes writing, singing, exercise, and mindfulness. Each of these practices includes a number of daily activities: my writing practice consists of my morning pages and some form of creative writing. Singing involves warming up and learning new repertoire. Exercising is a run or an online fitness class. And mindfulness is meditation or a mindful walk.
It’s a lot for one day. Especially when most of us feel like we’ve been hit by a covid-sized bus and are just trying to scrape the pieces of ourselves off the pavement.
Skill-building isn’t linear. There are fits and starts, spurts of quick and visible growth followed by periods of latency and quiet ripening. As excited as we are when starting out with a new practice, doing it every single day with joy and elation, we will inevitably be faced with waning motivation, environmental stressors, distractions, and any number of perfectly valid reasons to put off the practice until tomorrow.
Hence, the doomsday habit.
Pick just one thing, one practice from your impressive list, and commit to never compromising on it. To go a step further, pick one micro-chunk of your practice, and let that be your doomsday habit.
My doomsday habit has become my morning pages. If I only get four hours of sleep, and I have a splitting headache, and I’m angry at the world, and all I want to do is watch Schitt’s Creek from sunrise till sunset — I will, at the bare minimum, do my morning pages. The four horsemen of the apocalypse could be riding down the street, and I will still sit my ass down at my desk with a cup of coffee and write three pages of nonsense, because I have committed to doing this no. matter. what.
The doomsday habit gives you room to be human. It leaves space for the days when you just can’t, and keeps you moving forward anyway, even if it’s just an inch. And it builds confidence by showing you that, even on your worst days, you are still full of power and possibility.
