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I am the queen of bad habits. This is how to live your best life by ditching those toxic habits.
If you’ve ever searched for a downside to that routine life, this is it. I thrive on routines. Most of the time routines are great for making sure everything gets done in an orderly fashion, just how I like it. Unfortunately, sometimes we get so comfortable in our routines that we don’t notice they aren’t actually serving us anymore. Or maybe they never did in the first place.
These toxic habits were all born out of routines with the best of intentions. All I wanted was to get more done in a day, to do more in life, and to be a more “productive” person, whatever that even means anymore. This is what happens when you allow your quest for business perfection to go too far off the deep end. It took me a while, but I eventually realized that these 10 toxic habits weren’t doing me any favors, and I promised myself I’d make a change.
Do you recognize any of these behaviors in your life?
the “all or nothing” mindset
Have you ever had one of those days when one thing goes wrong, and so the whole day ends up being a bust? Or maybe you think just because you aren’t making huge moves today, you never will, so you might as well give up and lie down. I fell into this trap all the time. Don’t be like me; it won’t get you anywhere. All is great, but some is always better than nothing. You can’t give it all, all of the time. You’ll get burnt out, just like me when I decided I wanted to become a marathon runner right now. That didn’t last long.
treating sleep as a luxury
Sleep is a biological necessity, duh. But when you have something you desperately want to accomplish, sleep is often the first time-suck to go. I basically tried to replace sleep with caffeine, which we will discuss more later. I know, I know, telling yourself that it’s time to sleep when you have a million things you need to do is frustrating. But you’ll be more frustrated when you are trying to exercise and you can’t lift that damn 5 pound dumbbell over your head because you’re just so tired. Been there.
running on empty
You wouldn’t neglect to fill up your car with gas and still expect it to drive. Yet I often neglected eating and drinking for long periods of time, and then I wondered why I felt so unfocused and cranky. I know it’s hard sometimes, but please, just go drink some water. (Don’t mind me, talking to myself here…)
focusing on the past or the future
I have moments in my past that I am NOT proud of. I have learned some very valuable life lessons from those times, the most important being that I can’t take back all the stupid and rude things I’ve done in the past. (Embarrassingly, I have even tried to telepathically apologize, but that’s a not-in-my-right-mind story for another day.) Reflect on your past and absorb all the lessons it has taught you, but dwelling on it won’t get you anywhere.
letting clutter pile up
Cleaning isn’t my favorite activity, and so I used to put off all the cleaning until the weekend. I’d then spend all of Saturday scrubbing and being grouchy. If that wasn’t bad enough, in the meantime I’d be living amongst a mess that just kept multiplying like Helga Hufflepuff’s cup in the Malfoy’s Gringotts vault.
Instead of letting clutter pile up, now I clean a little every day. It takes me 15 minutes to put things away, wipe down a surface or two, and vacuum a section of the house. There’s something about having a clean environment that makes you want to get things done.
watching other people live
Movies. TV. The dreaded Social Media. I, once upon a time, used the “inspiration” excuse to explain why I parked myself on the couch, eyeballs glued to various screens for hours. Let me tell you, there is nothing inspiring about sitting still while watching other people move and live their lives. Especially if those people are fictional characters with superpowers, because you’ll never do that anyway.
setting impossible goals
People tell you to dream “big.” Not one person has told me to dream “realistic.” Through trying to build something of my own, I’ve realized that while telling your parents about your achievable goals doesn’t provoke the most enthused reaction, I have actually achieved more that way. Big goals are just that: big. So big that You don’t know where to start and it all seems so far away anyway, why even bother working right now? Set a goal that you can achieve by week’s end. Then set another one next week. Before you know it, all those little accomplishments will add up to something surprisingly monumental.
depending on caffeine
It’s truly a coffee-obsessed culture we live in. So much that I thought consuming 4 cups of coffee per day just to keep my eyes open and body upright was perfectly normal. It is not. I still sip one cup of coffee in the morning to get me going, but I don’t rely on it like I did before. And I definitely don’t treat coffee like a sleep replacement anymore.
multitasking just to get through the day
If you have so many items on your list that you have to do several at once just to get through them all, then I hate to break it to you, but none of those final products are your finest work. Sometimes, I would even add in extra little tasks to my to-do list just so that I could be doing one of these little tasks at the same time as a larger task. It’s as if I treated multitasking like a drug and I needed a fix in order to feel the “productivity high.” I get it, multitasking makes you feel like a superhero in the moment, but if you aren’t producing your best work because of it, then what’s the point? If you can, try to limit your to-do list to the amount of tasks you can reasonably tackle one-by-one.
buying material objects because I deserve it
Handbags. Yoga pants. Nail polish. Oooh Old Navy is 40% off! Does this sound like you? I’m not saying you don’t deserve nice things, but do you need those things, like right now? Start a wishlist and add all the items you want to buy to the list. It sounds too easy, and you might think your list will end up three miles long, but it probably won’t. When you have to literally write it down and look at all the random things you want in one place, it’s gets overwhelming. You won’t like it, so you’ll begin thinking really hard about what goes on that list. If an item makes it on the list and stays there over the course of several months, I allow myself to buy it, but not today.
That’s all for today!
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Till next time ♥︎
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