Habits of awareness and choice.

Our routines in which we find ourselves striving for, or shaming ourselves over is where we can look for greater insight to where we can find truth in the connection between our mind, body, and Self.

Everything from what we do when we first wake up, the route we drive to work, or how we respond to emails when we open our app, is a habit. It’s all habits, it’s all action, and at one point, it was a choice. At this point in our life we are also either working to incorporate more of something into our life, or eliminate something we want to stop doing. We can recognize “healthful habits” as actions that we enjoy that deserve moments of gratitude, and are worth celebrating. We can also recognize harmful habits as actions we participate in that no longer support who we want to be.

When I say life is expansive, it means we can look at one thing, and break it into many more things, to get more out of it. With health I want to expand our prior understanding of the typical 3-6 dimensions of health: Social, mental, and physical. These things we use to justify doing something, “eating ice cream for dinner makes me happy,” “it’s social media, therefor, ‘I’m connecting,” or even “he’s got a good body, he must be a good person.”

However, this healing space is about getting more out of life so we’re expanding our concept of health into 9 dimensions. They are here to give guidance on where we can grow and choose activities that support our growth. Filling our weeks with activities that build toward our goals allows us to use the stress we feel as energy to accomplish these goals. We “stress” because we care about what we want to be doing, and how we spend our time. 9 dimensions give us more options of things to focus on when figuring out “what to do with my time and energy,” “where I want to grow as a person,” or even reflect “how am I doing as a person?” When we can choose from multiple dimensions of things to do, boredom and hopelessness seem to no longer have a place in our minds when it comes to how we live our life. 

Example Practice: “I need to get morning sunlight to support my emotional and physical health.” “I need to call my grandma to improve my social health.” And even “I need to go to the music festival because I need to care for my creative and spiritual health.”

Pardon the quality of the laminated classroom art, this is the budget we’re working with. **Done is better than perfect!

Practice: When sitting down to make a list of things we’re grateful, it can be helpful to think of one thing we already have in our life for each category This can help create balance in our lives so that we can continue to live expansively, and leave room for synergistic emotions such as joy and gratitude. Use the chart above to help give definition to each of the 9 dimensions.

Goals and dreams are not achieved because we wish and pray for them, and it’s not even in one big action over night; they’re obtained when we make the smallest actions part of a routine that we check in on, care about, and make a priority to do. The accumulations of small steps and actions with a common thread make your goal and dream more possible.

It matters what we do in the smallest of moments; which actually takes the pressure off of us to “do something big,” with our life. Practice and apply little behavior changes to help make big changes in your life. Starting small helps because we start to think, “If I did that, I can do more.” And the learned success cycle begins to push away the doubt and fear cycles.

Once something has been practiced enough, and we update the internal conversation in our mind to recognize the activity as a something healthful and receive hormonal reward for it, our bodies want to continue with that pattern of action. This is the difference between people who like exercising, drink coconut water, or have bold conversations with people, and those people who don’t. At one point, we had to tell ourself, “do it anyway.” “do it scared,” “It’ll be worth it,” “my life will be better because I have done this.” Our Self can override the initial fear enough to make the positive self talk a part of our internal programming for the way our body responds.

Alert: Some things we do alter this reward at an unbalanced rate, like coffee, sex and alcohol. They take over our endocrine and nervous systems placing a greater expected emotional reward to the activity than we actually physically get. These activities create an anticipated reward for the activity for next time we think about engaging it it. These activities make our minds think we will enjoy doing them, more that we physically get a reward for in our brain, which makes these habits harder to break away from. Greater attention to a “re-alignment” to do other activities that are more healthful than these is necessary to break away from the habit of using these substances.

Our brain (the physical and chemical reactions" that happen within it) wants to help our mind (thoughts) and body (actions) prepare for what is ahead, but it just takes conscious training. If we’ve lived unconsciously (which most of us have until our mid twenties), some pattered behaviros have stuck with us, for better or worse. Our brain uses our senses to understand where we arein time and space, and it sends thoughts to our mind to cue us to an action. Certain actions carry greater weight if there was a greater reward attached to the behavior. example: Getting together with friends– “What are we drinking?” Driving home from work- “where’s my vape?” Boyfriend is mad again- “better keep my mouth shut.” At the gym- “that smoothie sounds good again.” Once we enter a familiar situation, our brain begins to recall things we’ve done there in the past. 

PAUSE. 

The past is not the present. This is why we need our focus and attention in the now, to better assess what we need for the current state of our body. Holding on to the past can, but doesn’t always help us in the current moment. Remember, our mind is inside a dark skull, it is relying on our senses to interpret the current time and space we are in. This process requires our attention towards re-alignment for what matters to our health, our safety, and our future, and now that our dimensions of health have expanded from social, physical, and emotional, we have more dimensions to check in with, “is this healthy for me?”

So as we find ourself in an eternal health journey we can shine light on almost anything we do is a habit; from the way we crack our eggs in the morning, and the way we discard the shells, to using a battery powered air blower to clean our driveway, or any machine over the hand-powerd tool as a habit. To help us look closely at our actions, a point of reflection can be "what's the purpose behind the way I do this?” From there we can go into “does this align with my values?” and then work to find little adjustments that can make our life that much more aligned with who we want to be. Life really is precious, and the more careful we are with our routines, the easier it becomes to enjoy.  

James clear, author of “Atomic Habits,” and many other inspirational quotes about how to live a great life teaches us that it is the systems we set up that help us be the person we want, not just having a goal to accomplish. He further explains that once we have a goal, and achieve it, this only only short term happiness. If we have systems of activities that we love doing, and they are supporting who we want to be, then there is more room for happiness in our life. 

Quality reminders when it comes to habits & starting new routines:

• Consistency supports confidence. 

• You don’t need to be great to start, you need to start in order to become great. 

• 1% progress per day compounds to massive progress. 

• Failures are opportunities to better improve for the future. 

• Slow down when you are feeling anxious or overwhelmed.

• You are capable of change. Visualize success, understand the feelings that will change along the way.

• You have a lot to learn, but accept this with an open mind and you are half way there.

• Let others inspire you, not intimidate you. 

• Affirm: “I am liberating myself from fear, judgement, and doubt.”

[Most of these statements aren’t mine to claim and quote, they’ve stemmed from other wise humans on this planet, but Ive accumulated them in a series of journals, and placed them here for organizational purposes.]

Trust in our habits feels like validation. Validation connects us with life and build on our spiritual health, it builds purpose into our actions. When someone compliments us on something we subconsciously do, it adds to our self-esteem, validating our self worth. When we lack connection with quality people, we might not get as many compliments about our behavior, and might question if what we’re doing is good, and can lead us down a troubled river.

Luckily we have some solid truths from science to tell us what good and healthful behaviors are, and now it’s up to us as individuals to work to put them into our daily routines.

Implementing systems to be effective in practice should be low burden, high impact, meaning “what little things can I do that can change my life for the better.” Again, start small. This way, it’s not an investment of time and energy wasted; especially if we forget that failure is a part of the learning, changing and growing process. We can prevent that cloud of sadness that would have consumed us making it too heavy to want to continue our higher paved journey. When our actions change, and we enjoy doing what we’re doing, they are more likely to stick. 

The reason activities stick around in our behaviors is because when we have more attention to our sensory input, there is more “invested” into this action; more for our brain to let our mind interact with. We can do this by slowing down and paying attention to how we feel through our 9 senses, (all 9, or at least more than our typical 1 or two we think about). Similarly, to our “Dimensions of Health,” expanding into more senses to focus on, it expands our energy systems giving us more out of the moment. It increases the odds that there is more to our benefit, new and exciting, for us to experience. This supports moving to a “new and energizing” activity, and away from “dreadful and stressful” one. It allows our body to stay out of the sympathetic stress response and more into parasympathetic response, so when it comes time to do the new habit, we’re less likely to freeze or flee, we act in confidence and possibly excitement. 

Healthful habits aren’t just limited to action of the body, they are also in responses and thoughts within the mind. These “habits of mind,” are mindsets, or state of mind that are skills to support our intellectual health, social health, and even financial health. Habits like “listening with empathy”, or “responding with wonderment and awe” help bring us into a skill to enhance our life perspective, that can be applied to numerous situations. These patterned thinking styles are built with awareness of our thoughts, and acknowledgement that our thoughts are just thoughts, and that we must observe deeper into what this thought is. A lot of my support and coaching centers around applying these habits of mind to conflicts within our journey.

On the contrary, there are also patterned thought cycles we can notice when we are experiencing tension that is preventing positive thoughts to flow (they are listed below).  With recognition of these thinking patterns in our real-life conversations, pause, and re-route the thought through the process of, “that wasn’t helpful.” and then state why the way of thinking was harmful to the situation. 

• Mental filter- using tunnel vision to look at a situation. Only sensing one aspect of a broad topic. 

• Jumping to conclusions- assuming, mind-reading or predicting what could happen, especially when related to something someone else will do. 

• Personalization- blaming yourself, taking responsibility for the occurrence of external events. 

• Catastrophising-viewing a situation as a whole “awful, dreadful, or horrible,” seems as if it’s beyond repair. 

• Black & white thinking- only seeing the extreme sides

• “Should”-ing and “must”-ing: saying these things puts  yourself out of the current moment, and adds pressure to something you are not doing at the moment. You can’t control other moment, this this one you can, either do, or don’t, but don't wish for something else while feeling bad about it. 

• Overgeneralisation- using statements as “everyone.. “Always..”  because it’s usually not true. When we find the deeper truth of specifics of when this applies, then the path to solution becomes clearer. 

• Labelling- or name calling, might put a “forever” stamp on who we think we are, or who other people are. It stereotypes and could put people in a box of unrealistic expectations. 

• Emotional reasoning- using a feeling alone to guide your actions. Remember, feelings are inside of us, and we have to identify why they show up. “I feel like something bad is going to happen..”

• Magnification and minimisation- focusing too much on small good things, and minimizing “bad” things. This might look like ignoring “red flags,” because there are also “green flags.”

After listing all of these, I’ve come to a conclusion that when we think this way, we fail to give credit to all that the problem we’re growing through is. Things are SO MUCH MORE complex that what we initially sense. This is why it’s so important to slow down and see the whole situation for as much as we can before reacting. 

A general fix for these “unhelpful thinking styles,” can be to “add dimension” to what we observe before sticking with a negative response. This is not to be overly positive and ignore the situation for what it really is. The fix is to recognize what the problem is, and to give it the care and attention for what it deserves. Having skills and habits is a helpful defense for a negative state of mind or body.

Practice: For example before choosing to say something harmful about a person, we might first apply "impulse control,” (a Habit of Mind) and think about the repercussions of sharing our perspective about that person~It might not be true, or relevant to your current situation, therefor, we should not waste energy bringing someone down. When we can expand on a problem, we might find another skill to apply, like connecting with empathy and really thinking about what their experience is that leads them to acting in such a way that brings us disgust. 

Focusing on building skills can help enhance learning new activities and bring an ease of success into our path through space-time, and this healing journey we call life. When it comes down to it, each action we take is either unconsciously chosen by a previous moment, or consciously decided in the moment. With goal achievement it’s about being open minded to changing the smallest habits to make the biggest differences in our life. To start, it begins with understanding how much there is to one action, so we can expand in it, finding more to resonate with and create a deeper investment in that activity. Consciousness is rewarded with connection.

Test: Slow down and observe our responses in the face of adversity, it’ll be apparent to know the truths of the nature of our reactions.

Life is more than just a filed of flowers. It’s the sun-seeds, leaves, insects, blue skies, and the bare-feet that walk within it. Painting by Jess.