Welcome to the first day of Self-Love February.

When it comes to habits, you need to understand how habits work. There’s a couple of really good books out there that I will try to find the information about, but I’m drawing a blank at the moment.

With habits, there’s a trigger, an action, and a reward. In order to change a habit, you need to disrupt the trigger and/or change the action.

For instance, if your current habit upon waking (trigger) is to grab your phone (action) to check emails or hop on social media (reward – feel connected) and you want to change it, you can’t change the trigger, but you can disrupt the action by placing your phone in a different room. Now, what do you want to replace it with? Journaling (action) – Organizes your day and what you want to accomplish (reward). Or maybe Yoga (action) – stretching, centered, and calm (reward).

Starting a brand new habit from scratch sucks and, trust me, is hard! All of 2022 was one big required habit change and it was super overwhelming and I basically didn’t change anything until the last couple months of the year when I broke it down into priorities. If you need to have a major life over-haul like I did last year – or you just want to add a couple new habits into your life, start small. Look at what can change and be replaced with the good habit you want.

For me, I started this back in January, but I’m going for consistency in February, is to add morning exercise. Just 30 minutes, so nothing extreme. Because my morning routine had changed, I have more time before going to work…. like 90 minutes. And since I have to add more physical activity into my life, this makes sense. More sense than spending over an hour on my phone!

So for me, my trigger: waking up. Action: work out. Reward: dopamine – the feel-good hormone!

What new habit do you want to start this month?

Or old habit you want to change?