Going with the grain of human nature

Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.
Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

🎵 Link to Playlist while writing this blog 🎵

For the past two days, I slumped back to my undesirable habits of falling asleep without cleaning up. I told myself – let’s just take a short nap and we’ll clean everything up later. This narrative isn’t new. This habit has been around for almost two decades. Its sibling “eating a lot at night” also has been hopping on to my life wagon for a while as well. From what I learned from the Atomic Habits, this nightly habit must have served quite useful treats for it to endure for such a long time.

Now, it’s completely comprehensible. No surprise that my attempts to cultivate a better night routine couldn’t stick. I prioritize the feelings of warmth, safety, relaxation, and happiness, and these habits fit the bills.

As I’m reading through the Atomic Habits, I also learned that our actions are carried on to fulfill our cravings, which are triggered by cues. In another sense, these fossilized nightly habits didn’t exist in isolation. They must have been triggered by something. It’s quite evident that there must be a physical birthing place for them as there are some days I am able to enact completely different actions. Reluctantly, I decided to complete the Habit Score Card, as strongly recommended by the book. It took me almost a day to complete, having fallen asleep halfway.

Habit Scorecard for almost a week. Gray highlights are what I considerable the critical-turning-point habits that I noticed leading up to my undesirable night habits.

After completing it, I was quite pleasantly surprised to learn how my day is actually filled with positive, desirable habits. I’m happy to see that the first half of my day is actually filled with activities that aligned with the identities I want to develop – clean, consistent, reliable, athletic, active person. I am particularly proud that making the bed has been something that I take pride in doing. It definitely feels refreshing to come back to my room and be welcomed by tidiness. To be honest, I decided to make my bed as I feared that the farm caretakers will come to my room and be shocked, possibly disgusted, at how my room looked so unkempt. In the language of Atomic Habits,

Cue: Messy bed
Craving: Doesn’t want to get found with a messy bed
Action: Make the bed
Reward: Feeling of relief that whoever comes to my room, including me, will see a clean space. A sense of pride in completing a clean action in the early morning. The messy bed is associated with the feeling of relief and pride.

What’s the result of gaining clarity with the Score Card?

I’m able to identify the area of time that I switched into auto-pilot and let the plane crash. With my gray highlighter, I went back to mark the habits that cascaded into my undesirable night habits. For example, I realized that napping in the afternoon is what led to me being unable to wake up for the last feeding round for the horses. When the guilt piled up, I’d just choose to stay in my room for the rest of the evening.

With awareness being injected into the afternoon and a new experiment with the Pointing-And-Calling, I am able to

Didn’t nap in the afternoon
Did my reading of Atomic Habits
Fed the horses for the last round of the day
Washed my dirty clothes (been left unattended for almost 4 days)
Cleared my trash
Didn’t buy nor eat potato chips or snacks from the shop
Marked off my new exercise habit of putting on the running shoes
Jogged and walked for 16 rounds (Walk 5 rounds, Jog 11 rounds), exceed my goals of 13 rounds in total
Stretch prior to and after the workout
Ate half of the rice I normally consume for dinner
Walked around the farm after dinner (in an attempt to figure out which animal will eat my leftover)
Found new points of interest in the Going Seventeen Kickball Episode and was able to limit myself to 1 Episode during dinner
Showered before the sunset – able to enjoy the sunset
Brushed teeth
Washed more clothes and hang them
Put on my Invisalign
Blogging about today’s experience – Writer Identity voted!

Having realized that I ultimately want to avoid the cold and desire the relaxing feeling of the night, I still allowed myself to watch Going Seventeen videos but put on a tighter rein on the duration. Since I love the feeling of just falling into slumber, rather than washing up right before I sleep and shivering in the cold of the night, I decided to take an early shower while it’s still warm outside. As I’m wrapping this post, I’d like to show you some of the pictures I took while exercising – fulfilling my new identity of being a photographer 📸🐶🥰