Our Habits Define Us

Solstice Holistic
6 min readAug 8, 2020

When you look at your typical day, week, or month, how happy are you overall with how you live each day? Do you feel closer by the day to your goals? Do you feel like you are living purposely? Passionately? Do you feel motivated? Productive? Do you feel yourself growing and being challenged by the day?

Take a moment and think about how you feel with your daily life right now, because our daily habits becomes the pattern and routine of our lives.

If you don’t feel any of the above, it’s ok. In fact, it’s pretty normal for any of us to have moments in our lives where we don’t feel much excitement or motivation, where we may get stuck just going through the motions, trying to keep up with our jobs, bills, all the more mundane but necessary aspects of our lives. The key is that we don’t want to get stuck here. And so many of us do, we resign ourselves for one reason or another, and we find it easier to go through life rather than to actually experience it and live it on our own terms.

When we get stuck like this, often times it is because we are living through sets of mostly unconscious patterns and habits. It’s easy and requires much less work on our part to get through the day, and unfortunately, the longer we live like this, the harder the habits and cycles can become to break.

We can think of it like this; let’s say that you’ve got a pretty comfortable job, you’ve been with this company for 5–6 years, the pay is good, you get benefits, you get weekends off, it sounds pretty good. However, the job stresses you out and by time it’s the weekend all you want to do is go out, spend some money, go home catch up on some Netflix shows or maybe play a game. When you first started this job, it was supposed to only be something for the time being as you worked towards ::insert goal/dream job here:: but you got off-track. You’re now 5+ years in and you feel stuck on this hamster wheel of a 9–5, and when you’re not at work you just want to relax and unwind.

Does this sound relatable? It’s how most people live their lives, and most will find ways to accept this reality and convince themselves it’s actually not a bad deal. And, for some, that may be true! I am certainly not knocking this, because as I said, we are all motivated by different things! But for many others, this becomes a sort of trap, which we fall into, and before you know it, that becomes our life and we don’t know how to really change it. It can be for many reasons, perhaps the risk of losing a stable job is too much, perhaps you have a family to support and raise, there are countless factors for why we will choose to stay in a place where we are unhappy, unchallenged, and unfulfilled.

However, even though we can become stuck in places such as this, and it doesn’t necessarily even have to be a job, we need to look at our own habits because the decisions we make daily are most likely playing a bigger role in why we become stuck than anything else.

Let’s go over a few habits that most of us have in our life;

  • Watching TV/Netflix
  • Video Games
  • Social Media
  • Going out on weekends; dinner, movies, bar with friends, etc
  • Shopping; online/malls

So these are all pretty common and normal habits we all have. And they all definitely have their place in our lives and provide us with down-time, de-stressing, connection, etc. Importantly, I would like to say first, that none of these things are intrinsically bad or unhealthy for you. With that said, the amount of time which you give these things can be.

If your week looks something like working all day, coming home to immediately turn the tv on, watching a show or playing a game while you order dinner on postmates, and during commercials checking your social media and mindlessly going through the feeds, I hate to break it to you, but your habits are the reason you’re stuck, unhappy, and unfulfilled. If your weekend doesn’t look much different except that you will get out of the house and meet up with friends at the bar, or maybe you’ll go to the mall and splurge on some new things, then again, your habits are running your life.

We all need time to decompress, but if every day you are finding yourself needing to escape your life, there might be a problem. How do we change these habits? How do we reclaim our time and energy and give ourselves better care and attention? How do we start stop trying to escape our realities and instead form them?

I’ve found the best way is just to take small and incremental steps, make little changes here and suddenly you have big changes there. We don’t need to be unrealistic and say, “Thats it! No more games, no more tv, and no more binge shopping at the mall!” We should be realistic about what our own needs are, the roles in which our own habits play within our needs, and set up small goals accordingly.

It could look something like this; You love playing video games, it’s a great break from daily life and you have fun. You normally play every night after work for a few hours and on weekends you will spend half the day playing. You want to cut this time down so that you can start exercising more, or working on a project that you’ve neglected for months now. You could allow yourself two days a week after work where you’ll play and only one day on the weekend where you’ll play for no more than a couple hours. It’s a small adjustment which now opens up more of your time to creating change and healthier habits in your life.

And this is just one simple example of how you can approach your own habits and behaviors and makes changes. It doesn’t have to be hard, painful or complicated. All it really takes on your end is the discipline and delay in gratification to say “no” right now, and to introduce habits and behaviors which will lead to positive changes in your life.

Maybe you’ve always wanted to write a book, maybe you want to run a marathon, or maybe you want to be a musician. It doesn’t really matter what it is, if you don’t dedicate your time and energy, it’s not going to happen. You can’t write a book if you spend most of your free-time on the couch binge-watching shows. You definitely can’t run a marathon if that’s how you spend your time.

We choose daily the future we want.

And most of us don’t want to accept that we really have so much choice and power in the matter. Because if we admit that then, well, we really have no one to blame but ourselves, and that sucks!

Solstice Holistic

I know because I’ve been there, I mean, I think it’s safe to say we all have at one point or multiple points in our lives. But when we get to the place where we are ready to admit we may just be the very things that hold ourselves back, it can almost become fun and a challenge to see how far you can push yourself and accomplish!

So what in your daily life needs to change? What habits are holding you back? What can you replace these habits with to live a life that is more aligned to your purpose, motivations and goals?

--

--

Solstice Holistic

Holistic Health and Wellness. Focusing on the mind, body, spirit connection. linktr.ee/SolsticeHolistic