In late August 2013, I resolved to break my habit of hitting the snooze button each morning. That resolve led to a new ritual I called “Fitness First:” the goal was to get out of bed when the alarm went off, get out the door as soon as possible, and head to a workout.
No stopping at Go, no checking email or social media, no “2-minute tasks.”
Each day, I logged the time I got up and the time I left my apartment. This might have seemed like overkill, but it turned out to play an important role in my process.
During the first few years of this new ritual, I’d have days when it would take me a little longer to get out the door. Occasionally I’d be so tired that I needed to get back into bed even after getting up.
Although I still maintained the spirit of “Fitness First,” I sometimes felt like a fraud and a failure. In my mind, I was measuring myself against a story that in the first days of the new ritual I was like a machine: up and out within 30 minutes or less.
Then I went back to my journal entries and time logs, and I saw a completely different story. In fact, even in those first days and weeks, I had stumbled more times than my mind recalled.
My logs revealed that I was comparing myself against a standard of perfection that I had never actually achieved.
Rather than beating myself up for my periodic divergence, I recognized that these days were part of the pattern, not an aberration from it. Recognizing this helped me maintain perspective and continue my ritual.
In the past year I’ve changed some elements of my ritual to accommodate changing hormones and a need for my ADHD meds to kick in. Rather than view this as a deviation, I consider it a necessary accommodation for a new season.
In over a decade experimenting with my own habit change methods and coaching others through the process, it’s become clear to me that the quickest way to fail in creating new rituals is to hold yourself to an unrealistic standard of perfection.
It’s important to set an ideal for the routine you want to create, while also recognizing that in the day-to-day practice you might have some variance.
Over the long arc of time — across over a decade, the few days or weeks when I had some delay or divergence from the norm fade into the mix of the overwhelming number of days when I hit my mark.
The spirit of “Fitness First” still holds: I start my mornings with intention, I follow my own agenda, and I haven’t missed a workout in over 12 years.
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