Good or Bad – What’s Your Habit?

This morning as I was hitting my snooze button repeatedly trying to avoid getting up, I started thinking about habits. Good habits vs. Bad habits. I have many of both, good and bad habits. Not that they necessarily equal good with bad, but it’s amazing how damn hard it is to change a bad habit and how simple it is to drop a good habit. I am especially pondering this since tomorrow is my weigh in day and I am pretty confident the bad habits outweighed the good habits.

Actually I have been struggling trying to find the words to articulate what I am trying to say. Then I realized that a good habit is simply the absence of a bad habit or vice versa. Or perhaps a good habit is action and a bad habit is lack of action. In other words, if I consistently exercise on a regular basis, that’s a good habit. If I never exercise that’s a bad habit. The good habit has many positive results, like the release of endorphins, a stronger healthier body and overall better mood. The bad habit has negative results, like less energy, guilt, tighter clothes, etc. Yet I can drop that good habit in a flash and will struggle endless to try to get myself to turn that bad habit back into a good habit. And I would bet you know exactly what I am talking about.

A good habit I have is not allowing the junk mail to pile up on my desk. When it is a good habit, I open my mail immediately and toss all the junk. I put the bills into a pay folder, it is a very organized and easy system. It’s a good habit that keeps my desk tidy and eliminates the clutter all in less than five minutes. This should not be difficult to be consistent, it has all positive results. You know I bet I only practice this good habit a third of the time. All the other times with lack of action it becomes a “bad” habit and I let that crap pile up on my desk until there literally is not any place left to work. I only saved two to five minutes over a short period of time not addressing the junk mail when it came in. Then I will spend a few hours trying to unbury my desk. Good habit vs. bad habit does not even make sense.

Another good habit is eating a lot of salads. I love salads. I have a few different ones that I like to make. They are delicious, nutritious, they are easy and they are a great way to fill up without a lot of calories. Want to know how often I practice this good habit? Less than the good mail habit. It’s not like I prepare the same damn salad over and over. I have some pretty spectacular and yummy recipes. So why not? Because sometimes I just don’t feel like it? I think this could be only answered by a professional in which I would have spent numerous hours with.

Actually this list could go on and on and on, but I’m not quite sure I want to air all my dirty laundry. And I am pretty sure you would immediately discontinue following these posts. But you get the point. So I guess my best self advice is to just try to practice more good habits than bad and then I will be moving forward with the action.

NOTE TO SELF: Have a Salad Today!