Using Mindfulness to Get on Track with a Habit

Posted On August 17, 2020

Are you working on changing a habit? Perhaps exercise, or healthier eating, or reading more? I have found that mindfulness is incredibly helpful in starting a new habit or getting back on track if I start to lose momentum with something I’m working on. I thought I would share a personal case study and hopefully, it will inspire you to apply mindfulness in your own life!

Exercise is one of those things that feels like it should be a no-brainer. There is so much evidence about the benefits – for our long-term health (both physical and mental), our happiness, how well we sleep. And whenever I DO exercise, I always feel so much better afterward and wonder why I sometimes have an inner struggle about it. I did a lot of reflection and iteration to finally get in a rhythm before the pandemic, and now I’ve had to start from scratch. I’ve learned a lot from the fits and starts about the power of mindfulness in following through with my intention.

Pre-COVID, my general routine was to exercise after work. I would not call myself a morning person and I had many failed attempts to get up at 5:30 to get to the gym before work (even though it sounds like an excellent idea in theory). I managed to get in the groove with weekend morning workouts thanks to intermittent fasting but I was not as consistent with my weeknight workouts as I aspired to be.

My first step was to find workouts that I enjoyed. I previously had been stuck in a rut of doing the same weightlifting routine for over a decade and was bored of the same old elliptical workout. I knew I needed to change things up and finally decided it was time to invest in a nice gym. Part of my rationale is that if I am paying a lot for the gym, I am more motivated to go. So I joined Equinox a few years ago and LOVED the classes (HIIT, boxing, yoga, etc) and the overall spa-like experience. As a very frugal person by nature, this was a significant decision but I think it was worth it in terms of how much it energized my workout routine. And the high membership fee did motivate me to exercise a lot more than I had in the year before joining.

However, after the initial novelty wore off, I noticed some ebb and flow to my consistency. I wrote earlier about the value of tracking my exercise to ensure I make time for it and having a log of my exercise helped uncover that I wasn’t working out quite as much as I wanted to. So I tried to figure out why.

A big part of mindfulness is having more awareness of the body and the physiologic manifestation of how we are feeling. The author that inspired me to sign up for my first silent meditation retreat talks in his book about how every emotion has a physiologic correlate and if we pay attention, we can increase the resolution of our perception and thus increase our self-awareness. So I started paying more attention to my energy level. I would leave work with the intention to go to the gym, and I noticed a distinct pattern that sometimes during my one-hour commute on the BART and the bus, I would start to feel tired and weary from my workday. So I implemented a new tactic: change into my workout clothes before leaving work. Somehow that small change was enough to increase my gym attendance because I would tell myself: well, I made the effort to lug my gym clothes to work and already took the time to change, I might as well just go. Based on my log, that increased my weekly workouts by about 20%.  

That helped but sometimes even once wearing my workout clothes, I noticed that because the gym is three bus stops after my apartment, I would sometimes STILL decide to bail at the last minute. It’s the classic inner voice: “You deserve to just relax after a long day”. So then I implemented a new rule that I had to at least GET to the gym. I could leave after two minutes, but I had to at least go. So at a minimum, I would do a brief foam-rolling warm up and indulge in a chilled eucalyptus towel (I know, this level of fancy is way beyond what I ever thought I would have in my life.) And the majority of the time, just being AT the gym surrounded by super-fit people would boost my energy and was an inspiration to do my workout after all. I will confess, I still occasionally left after 5 minutes, but I figured I gave it my best shot.

The mindfulness came in by paying attention to my energy at all the junctures where the breakdown was occurring in my quest to get to the gym. It is amazing how much these small adjustments increased my volume of weekly workouts and I got up to a consistent 20+ workouts a month as a result of these new tactics.

Of course, once the pandemic hit, my routine fell apart. Partly because the gym closed but also I had a whole new set of factors coming into play. More about that in a future post. 🙂

Is there something you’ve been trying to work on? I’ve found mindfulness to be such a pragmatic tool in addressing habits, give it a shot. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!