drop some habits while you're at it
boundaries are the most important thing you'll ever learn about habits
when I moved to Canada over two years ago, I was sure life wouldn’t change that much. I would keep working remotely for my clients back in Brazil, still walk my dog three times a day, go to the gym every morning… with the addition of night classes, it didn’t seem like things would change that much.
boy, was I wrong. between classes, furnituring my apartment, and caring for myself and my dog, I was slowly (but surely) overwhelming myself.
call it stubbornness, call it discipline, but I refused to let go of my morning routine and the habits I’d been nurturing for years. wake up, write my morning pages, recite my affirmations, drink a glass of water, walk my dog, have breakfast, shower and get ready for work, and read for half an hour.
now, picture this:
for all of that to happen, I woke up at 5 am. I know, I know. I’m one of those. but trust me when I say I have been waking up at that god-forsaken hour since I was ten. anyway, consider, also, these two variants:
I arrived at Canada in the late fall/early winter, meaning we already had a two-hour time difference from Brazil (so, instead of starting work at 9 am, I’d have to start at 7 am).
my classes started at 5 pm and ran til 9h30 pm. I would arrive home around 10 pm and be ready for bed at 11 pm. to wake up at 5 am the other day.
so, yeah. it was rough. for some insane reason, though, (I call that sense of normalcy) I didn’t want to give up my morning routine, nighttime routine and any other habit I brought with me when moving. I felt like I needed to suck it up and just handle things like a grown-up.
and as a hiper-independent person, asking for help was out of the question. not that I could. again, I had just moved countries and knew no one I could run to when things got hard.
and hard they got, because two months later, in late december, one week before the holidays, I broke down during a business meeting, crying so hard I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t breathe.
I left that meeting finally hearing the sirens and alarms blasting my mind telling me that I couldn’t do it all and that I needed to step back immediately or else.
so, I did.
the agency of habits
I read this article a while back talking about ‘wellness burnout’. it means what you think it does: you have so many habits and rituals to help you feel good they have the opposite effect.
I was so sure I was doing myself a favour by keeping my routines intact that I forgot to consider how not having them might be extremely beneficial for my body and mind to adapt to a new reality. things looked the same but everything was different. my environment, my social circles, the climate (no one can ever prepare you for a -20°C morning). everything and nothing was the same.
I felt like a toddler. adult things I already excelled at doing (taxes! taking the bus! making an optometrist appointment!) suddenly were foreign. I didn’t even know how to transfer money from my account to a friend’s when they paid for dinner.
it’s humbling and discouraging at the same time.
and even though things looked the same, at one point I had to admit they weren’t and the mental load involved in creating a new life from scratch was too much to keep my lovely routine intact. hell, I couldn’t even tell if I liked those damn routines anymore.
so I took 10 steps back because just the one was too little for what was going on. I quit everything, morning and nighttime routimes be damned!, and gave myself what I needed: time.
the meeting I ended up crying on? yeah, I quit that client (I was a freelancer) because they refused to stop working between christmas and new year.
on the topic of work, I scaled way back and set a rule of working only until 4pm and not working at all on the weekends.
I quit the gym too, only for a while.
I stopped waking up at 5 and gave me an extra hour every morning.
I kept walking my dog because going outside and moving my body at least a little bit was necessary.
I stopped writing and creating content (something I love) for a few weeks.
I allowed myself time to rot on my (brand new) couch.
by the time late january came around, I was feeling better and missing some habits. being active is really important to me because it helps manage my anxiety, so getting back to the gym was my first order of business. now, I didn’t go full ‘gym bro’ (like I wanted to), but I decided that ‘doing the bare minimum’ would be my new motto.
instead of working out for a full hour, I would commit to 25 minutes, three times a week. if I wasn’t in the mood to do strength training, then I’d use that time to stretch and walk on the treadmill. and I would most definitely try my best not to judge myself for skipping a day or cutting a session short.
I kept those tiny rules for a month. and writing started to call my name again, like a syren. I couldn’t resist, so, again, I committed to tiny rules:
I will journal for 5 minutes, at least three times a week, stream of conscious style (my favourite).
you get the idea, right?
today, I’m happy to say my morning routine is almost as glorious as it was, as is my nighttime routine, and the rest of my day. it took me a while to get here, but I’m glad I did and, most importantly, I’m glad I did it with kindness.
you know, I kept thinking about what I wanted out of this essay, and I think the main point is to talk about boundaries, and how they are the most important aspect of creating a habit.
without those boundaries in place, I would be on my way to overwhelming and burning out once more, and at my lowest, I promised I would never feel like that ever again. but for that to happen, I had to learn how to say ‘no’.
I had to listen to the insane voices in my head telling me I had to keep going and say ‘no’. I had to feel my body screaming for a workout and say ‘no’. my creative mind was chaotic, expecting me to write some new content, and say ‘no’.
it had an addendum, though. 'no, but just for a while.'
I saw this interview with brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen the other day, where she spoke about how 'your yes means nothing if you don't know how to say no.' and that stuck with me because even though I was saying ‘no’ to everything that I hold dear and that made me feel like me, I was saying ‘yes’ at the same time.
‘yes’ to resting. ‘yes’ to admit I was lost. ‘yes’ to taking it slow. ‘yes’ to finding my rhythm. and that, I believe, was the biggest gain of all. once I started saying ‘yes’ to my beloved habits again, they had meaning, but most of all, they had agency. I was making a choice because I knew it was the best for me, and every single one of those habits became precious in return.
so if you're struggling with habits and if you feel like you have to do it all before the end of january or else, take this as a reminder that you do not, in fact, need to tackle every single habit people say is good for you. you might actually need to step back and drop them all just so you can pick the ones you love to create the life you want to live.
take care,