Habit Building

March 5, 2012 by despitemyself 2 Comments

“Even if you fall on your face, you’re still moving forward.”
~Victor Kiam

This is the swanky cover I made for my habit building pocketmod.

Okay, I have mentioned my habit building a couple of times, so I am finally going to spill it.

I took the idea of the PocketMod folded booklet.  (I am told the original site is no longer being supported, so a new site has sprung up to continue the work: rePocketMod.)

You print one piece of paper that is folded into eight pages.  The site has an online constructor that lets you choose from a wide variety of pages to make any sort of booklet that suits you: calendars, food journal, games, to-do lists, tip tables, planner pages, graph pages, etc.  Many of the pages can be customized.  Of course they can’t be customized as much as I wanted, so I found a forum post elsewhere that showed the arrangement of the individual pages on the paper for the right order after folding & made my own in GIMP.  I just had to have fancy fonts & arrangements, & quotes on every page.

I can’t find the link to the page template anymore, so for anyone interested here is the template I made. 

Today marks the end of two successful weeks at my habits.  Currently those are taking a shower, washing the dishes, & exercising.  That’s it.  Whatever else is going on I do those three things every day.  And I have done it every day for two weeks.  Technically I’m a day short because I haven’t done them for today yet, but I’m pretty confident I will.  A couple of days I have felt like blowing it off & even went to bed without doing them, but both times I slept about an hour & a half, then magically woke up & did them all before going back to bed.

For the exercise I don’t have any requirements.  Some days I’ve gone out & walked/ran for an hour or more.  Other days I have just done a few minutes with hand weights or on my mini stepper.  Many days have fallen somewhere in between those two.  I’m not focused on what I do, just on getting it done.  I’m building a habit after all!

Washing dishes is just washing dishes.  Nothing much say about that.  I do them at night after dinner is all done & put away, so no dishes left over night.  That’s a new thing around here.

The one I am most excited about is the showering.  It probably sounds pretty simple, but one of the great mysteries of mental illness is hygiene tends to go out the window.  No one is sure why, but I think it has to do with not feeling worthy of being taken care of.  When I am feeling down, I hardly have the energy to take a shower.  It’s exhausting.  The days I do, it is all I get done because it really does  take it all out of me.

What makes the showering so exciting is that it isn’t just take a shower & be done with it.  One of the reasons I specifically picked a shower over other hygiene habits, was because I knew it would lead to a lot more getting done.  When I take my shower at night, I also change into clean clothes, brush my teeth, wash my face, moisturize, & I have been working on my dry, yucky feet.  I have also started paining my nails again, have been putting my hair up in a sock bun still damp & sleeping it, to get curls the next morning.  The last couple of days I had to go out during the day & took the time to put make-up on.  How fancy for me!

Every day I complete all three of my habits, I have myself a sticker^_^

I want to build habits that will carry me through even the dark times, & however far this goes after this six weeks these three will be my anchor habits.  If I get to a point where I can’t keep up with what all I have going on at the time, these three will be the ones to focus on & their absence will be a marker of trouble to be nipped in the bud.

I have six weeks of pockmods printed out.  At that time I’ll choose at least one of the habits to change out.  I am not thinking that far ahead though.  I am focusing on now & not getting ahead of myself.  I have a nasty habit of getting to caught up in how things could be & then loosing my focus on the present, then becoming overwhelmed & quitting.  So far I am feeling really good & hopeful.

I think this idea has a lot of potential, & would love to hear if anyone else decides to try it or try their own version of the PocketMod!