When I came back from Rise, I was inspired to do better. I mainly felt convicted around health and wellness because this was an area I’d been sitting on the back burner for so long. I also felt a little attacked about wasting my morning hours. It was hard for me to not try to enhance all of my habits at once, so I picked a few small things to work on first. 

Since we’re wrapping up the first month of the year and most of us have already abandoned our New Year’s resolutions, I thought I’d share these simple hacks I’ve been doing for the last few weeks. These are super easy to do and don’t require major life change. The idea, however, is to build a little momentum that could nudge us along to bigger changes. 

Here’s 3 easy habits I’ve created:

1. No checking my phone until I’m up and out of bed. I’d gotten in a bad habit of scrolling in bed and not getting up as early as I’m supposed to. The idea behind the habit is to reward myself with checking my notifications after I’ve done the positive behavior of getting out of bed. The only exceptions to this currently are that I’ll text Zach good morning or check the weather. Everything else has to wait until I’m out of bed. 
2. No coffee until after I’ve had a glass of water. I’ve been tracking my water intake again and I’ve found that it’s much easier to hit my daily amount when I start the morning strong. Rather than jumping straight to the coffee, I make myself get some water in first. Studies show that a glass of cold water in the morning helps you to wake up and boosts your metabolism. More importantly though, I start my morning strong and make immediate progress towards my water goal for the day. Did you know that you’re supposed to drink half of your body weight in ounces of water a day?? For example, if you’re 150 pounds, you need 75 ounces of water a day. 
3. Write down 5 things I’m grateful for every single morning. There’s a ton of research about how gratitude positively affects our lives. I was given a Start Today journal with my Rise ticket and I’ve been following those prompts every morning lately. The thing is, you don’t need a fancy journal for this. Use the back of a post it note or a trash envelope. Just write some stuff down. Furthermore, don’t write the big stuff like your health or house or spouse. Write down little random things that brought you joy — a new comfy sweater, using your favorite coffee mug, good smelling shampoo, etc. The purpose is to train our eyes to look for little joys. 

Here’s the thing — it’s super easy to start the year off strong and then fail or lose traction. It’s easy to give up and feel like the year is already shot. However, we still have 11 months left! Wouldn’t you prefer 11 months of progress over none? It is 100% normal to already need to start over. Most of us are right there with you, looking back on January as a loss. The trick is to get back up and DO SOMETHING over just throwing in the towel for the other 11 months because you got off track. 

It’s also ok to completely regroup on your goals for the year. You might have gotten off track because the goals you set for yourself weren’t really all that important to you. If you’re not sold on them, you’ll never stick with it. Pick something easy and let’s get back to work. 

The book Atomic Habits says that a proven way to form a positive habit is by creating a reward for the new habit. You can see that I’ve done that with two of my habits. I can check my phone, after I’ve done the new habit of getting out of bed. I can have the coffee, after I drink some water. Getting a reward after doing the new thing, tricks your mind into wanting to do it more. I’ve noticed after just a few weeks that I already associate drinking my coffee with having water first. Now, I wouldn’t recommend rewarding yourself with cake after a workout, but YOU DO YOU!

Whether you try any of these little tricks or not, the main thing I want you to take away from this message is to simply get back up and do something. We’re not massive failures because we didn’t stick with our January plans. Maybe the initial plan was dumb and you shouldn’t stick with it anyway! Maybe you just needed to start with something a little smaller like what I mention here. Either way, the key to being able to look back on 2020 as a win, is to keep going. 

Anyone else down with calling January a free trial month and starting over in February?? Let’s do it.