Bad Habits
When you start thinking about a healthy lifestyle, one of the most important things to be assessed is HABITS.
We all have them: good ones, bad ones, and ehhh the harmless guilty pleasures we pretend not to like.
Good habits help foster health, happiness, positive vibes, and well, they don't exactly look bad on you either!
Bad habits help to destroy those things, and usually the payoff is some sort of downward spiral that lands you anywhere from mildly displeased to manically depressed.
So yea, I guess your habits -- whatever they may be -- are kinda important or something.
I've kicked a ton of bad habits in the last year of my life, and established some pretty kickass habits in their place. And then there are those lingering bad habits that are just....there... and easy....and maybe (we think) harmless.
But are they really?
Assessing your bad habits is healthy, and I challenge you to take a look at yours.
What needs to go?
What needs to stay?
What's the payoff in keeping them around?
Here are some of mine:
1. Staying
up late....
I know what it takes to accomplish all that I have to do in a day. If I want my morning writing done, I have to be up and ready to go, not up and groggy for two hours. If I want to fuel my body with a healthy breakfast, I need to be well rested so that I have the time to do that and also, so I’m not ramped up on hunger-inducing hormones that race through your body when you don't sleep and hijack your brain in the morning, making you crave greasy, carb-loaded breakfast food. If I want a badass workout and cardio session, I need to be rested, fueled, hydrated, finished with morning writing, and ready to go by 9 am.
If I’m sluggish and foggy, I’m out of it in there.
I'm not going to be able to lift as heavy.
I'm not going to move as fast when I get to my cardio.
I'm not going to hit that drop set or lift to failure.
I'm going to be sloppy.
I'm going to look as bad as I feel.
When I get back to my work, I will sit at the computer and stare blankly into space or google “How to write while tired” (which I may or may not have actually done a time or two....)
Also, I’m going to want a nap, I’m going to want an aimless drive around town, I’m going to want fatty, greasy fast food because those hunger-hormones are still kicking.
I'm most certainly not going to be focused on the rest of my writing that day.
I’m going to be delirious, but then I’ll catch a second wind around 9:00 and want to (A HA) stay up late again! It’s a subtle drug, I tell ya. But there’s something about the TV shows that come on starting around 8:00 that are just guilty pleasures, and they allow me to go into autopilot and enjoy some mindless entertainment until I realize it’s midnight (crap). And then I’m just alllllllll thrown off.
There really is NO payoff here...(says 10 am Megan.... 11 pm Megan sometimes sings a different tune)
....yea that's about right....
2. Negativity,
criticism, and complaining. Oh, and PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZE YOU — UGH!
Ever watched the Superbowl press conference and heard the winning head coach get up there and thank all of the people who were constant threads of
negativity in his life? Me either. Know why?? Because...
Yet do I ever notice that during slumps
and bouts of writers block or gym shame, I seek people who want to sit and commiserate and
give me one thousand reasons why I should just quit trying to write
altogether? And forget about the weight room and focus on all of
the reasons why life is hard and why choosing to reach higher is really kinda pointless?
Almost exclusively. What’s the deal?
We don’t want people to hold us
accountable in those moments of creative despair I guess.
But the best
influences in my life are going to be those who are positive, motivating, and
supportive.
Those who talk about what I am capable of in such an inspiring way
that it moves me to action.
Negativity affects us all in a variety of ways. For me, it sets
my blood boiling and welcomes in one thousand and forty seven OTHER negative thoughts that have nothing to do with the problem at hand.
It makes me want to crawl into a hole and seek the boring serenity of my quiet little
life ASAP!
But then, like the sneaky little sh** that it is, it creeps up while I’m
working and throws my train of thought entirely offtrack.
From those who focus
constantly on the negatives to those who criticize my health, my lifestyle, my
constant working, down to those who openly degrade me and belittle me,
negativity has to go.
Ever heard the saying "Your vibe attracts your tribe?"
It's true.
Find the people who will lift you up and encourage you in your work, your life, your goals.
Find the people who don't want to hear your excuses,
Who don't want to give you theirs,
Who want to see you succeed in life.
Keep them around you.
You need them more than you think.
3. Angry
thoughts...
I could harp on them all day long if I wanted to. I’m a dreamer.
Sometimes I’m dreaming of winning that Oscar for the best
Novel-become-Screenplay (or whatever it's called) or being on the set of a movie based on one of my novels. (Hey.. dreams are important -- why not dream big and have unrealistic goals? They might be more realistic than you think!)
And then sometimes
I’m thinking about all of the annoying, degrading, abusive, sabotaging experiences of life.
I think of all the times I wish I would have stood up for myself when I was that feeble girl who didn’t know she
had a voice.
And I picture the things that Megan 2.0 would say in those moments, the way
she would hold herself, the badass maneuver she would use to demonstrate that
she did, in fact, mean it when she said “do not touch me.”
Are these
beneficial at all? Sometimes, honestly, yes they are, a little. While listening
to Christina Aguilera’s Fighter on
the elliptical machine, for instance, hyping myself up for a boxing session.
While sitting here trying to write about a family battling survival during the
Great Depression and some twelve year old boys playing sandlot baseball in a
racially segregated neighborhood in 1938? No. Never.
They bring me back to
times that would be very healthy to be forgotten, and they remind me of experiences that are in the past for a reason, or, worst of all, they remind me of things
undone, unsaid, that seem unfair and cold and wrong and betraying and at the
end of the day cannot be undone or fixed.
That’s when you have a problem.
When
you are obsessively returning to a real topic, rooted in a real memory that is
dark and deeply painful, and reliving actual moments that you wish you could
have had the courage to create.
That is destructive in a number of ways, and I
could fill the pages of a book with all of the reasons why…Perhaps someday I
will.
But, for now, this is a habit that needs to go. Like yesterday. Like all
the moments from that old life are gone. Forever. Foreva-eva. Goodbye.
4. Social Media?
Ehhhhhhhh, I didn’t even want to type that one. It’s such a guilty pleasure. It
is so easy to get to the end of something productive (a chapter, a workout,
cooking…) and just see what’s going on out there.
And then it’s an hour later
and you haven’t gotten to the end of the news feed yet and you’re four news
stories deep and you’ve gotten annoyed 47 times with the comments you just had to read through, and you stalked someone down to their seventeenth cousin twice
removed’s ex husband’s new girlfriend’s roommate’s father’s friend’s daughter
who you now feel so invested in you might as well send a friend request, and….
Wait what was it I even took a break from? Ahhhh!
It is probably the number one
distraction for our generation because we hardly ever even notice how distracting
it really is! And time consuming. And mentally draining. And borderline
socially disgusting.
I mean really... how many news articles about Kim and Kanye really need to be circulating on our news feed on any given day? Oh, they ate lunch today? You're kidding, right? Stop what you're doing, we need 583 comments on that story fa sho.
Oh and hello successful, grown women hosting a morning show that focus exclusively on spreading the juiciest gossip of the day... You really need to be the topic of discussion for us grown-ass educated people don't you?
And why the hell is it so easy to get sidetracked by this circus?!
And why am I so annoyed by this when I JUST said I need to cut out negativity and criticism?! Ahh.... see?? It's an annoyingly vicious cycle!
But let's be honest.
I'm still gonna peruse social media and see what my friends are up to.
And I'm still gonna stay up late every now and then, because when E! airs a marathon of The Royals, I mean, what else can I do?
And I'm gonna fall into the cycle of negativity sometimes.
But it still doesn't hurt to assess it and clean up those bad habits.
They say life is too short to be unhappy but I kinda think at the end of the day, life is too long to stay unhappy! It costs nothing to be kind and positive. It can be done :)
XOXO
- Meg
