Did COVID Kill Your Habits?

Old habits die hard. They die really hard in the face of a pandemic. We spend endless hours building up our daily rituals in the hopes standing upright amidst the tides of a tsunami. In our deepest moments of tumult and pain though, do your positive habits show up when you need them the most? For many, they do not; their good habits crack under the pressure of unforeseen new conditions. For some, the discipline of preparedness and consistency propels them to success, no matter the environment.

If you ask most people who meditate about their practice, they’ll tell you that they find it helpful for overcoming difficult situations and coping with life’s hardest questions. For those people, it is the daily consistency and the hundreds (or thousands) of hours of practice that allows them to experience the benefits of meditation. For those looking for self-improvement, they must understand that its imperative to build up the runway of your daily habits to experience the deepest benefits that come along with its consistency. It doesn’t happen overnight. As the Navy Seals say, “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.” So, when crisis arises, you’re ready to wield your greatest powers if you’ve been practicing all along. For that reason, there’s never a bad time to start a positive habit. You never know when you’ll need it most.

The Time to Start is NOW

According to a 2009 study done by the European Journal of Social Psychology, it can take anywhere from 18-254 days to create a habitual action. It’s quite inconclusive and individualistic on how long it takes to make a habit autocratic. With such variable brain responses to a habit, we leave ourselves vulnerable to disruption if we don’t find a way to create the neurological connections to creating new positive habits, quickly. So what positive habits should we seek out in times like these?

Journaling Through a Pandemic

Pandemic, chaos and uncertainty can blast your brain’s neural pathways into a world of confusion and dissonance. Left unattended, our brains will operate in an animalistic first order set of principles to try to cope with the uncertainties. That’s why there is no better way to combat these tendencies than to address them, voice them, or better yet, write them, head on. Journaling is the perfect offset of uncertainty as it allows you to address and label your deepest emotions. Whether positive or negative, the act of writing them out works to label your feelings and allows for greater understanding and acceptance. For those writing about gratitude and joy, they often lead to greater manifestations of happiness in their lives. Writing activates a cluster of neurological pathways that seek to build order and understanding for the brain, thus patching the holes caused by uncertainty in a pandemic. To aid in the positive feelings, scientifically, writing can trigger dopamine releases, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.

So as you continue your journey through habit formation, remember that now is ALWAYS the answer to start and finding a deeper understanding of self can be the quickest way to understanding and coping with the world.