why Our Habits matter..

I’ve been so meaning to write this blog post for the longest. However, I have not made it a common behavior for me to do so to sit down, open my laptop and to write my thoughts. So what about this is a concern? For me, I love to write. I love to have a web site and I love to “voice” my opinions and this blog is a way for me to do that. But this concern isn’t a life or death type of thing, so I let it slide.

So what are habits? Habits are behaviors that we do repetitively with little or almost no mental effort or exertion. We don’t have to think about it, we just do it (over and over).

A lot of habits (good or bad) are not immediate concerns (probably most of them). The consequences do not come right away. In this way, we are not always aware that what we do or not do repetitively, matters. Here’s one example. I’m not the best or have not been in the habit of always flossing my teeth. So last year when I went to the dentist’s office for a cleaning, they told me that my gums are inflamed and that I need deep cleaning with local anesthesia, every 3 months (instead of every 6 months) where they scrape the tartar off my teeth and floss my teeth for me. It is easy to not do the extra step to floss your teeth because you don’t initially notice any bad consequences, but after decades, you end up like me, going to the dentist every 3 months! Of course, these days, I am trying hard to be in the habit of flossing, and I’m up to flossing maybe 5 days of the week, but right now it’s a conscious “habit”. I have to think about it. I have an App reminder. It’s been about a month, but I’m getting there. Someday, I will reach for the floss without thinking about it and it will be when I notice that I do that, that I can proudly say I made it a good habit. For now, because it’s something that I want to keep on doing, I am trying as best as I can to remember, but having grace for myself if I forgot (but not to “beat myself up about it” but merely to try the next time).

So why do habits matter? It is what we do most of the time, over a long time that matters more than a one off or occasional event. So for instance, if you are talking about nutrition and food, if you ate more calories than you can burn off (doesn’t matter whether it was in the form of cake or salad), once in awhile, your body doesn’t react too much to it. But if you ate more calories in a day than you can burn off in a day (yes, even if it was all salads) most of the time, you will gain fat (unless you were eating a lot of protein and also doing enough resistance exercise to warrant muscle weight gain). But this isn’t with just nutrition. This goes for everything (wearing sunscreen only because you are going to the beach on a sunny day vs wearing sunscreen everyday the sun is up yields different results on your skin in the long term).

So if you sum up all of the things or habits that we do, our cells over the long run reap the benefits or suffer the consequences of our long term, daily habits. WE are our habits!