The Reboot
So you’ve decided you’re ready to make changes in your life. You’ve sat down and said to yourself “I want to reboot my life and routines.”
Now what?
If you’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution or tried to keep a friend accountable for one, you’re probably familiar with what I’m about to discuss. The tendency when we make big decisions is to make, well, big decisions. We want to change our diet by cutting out junk foods; we want to start working out every day; we want to begin devoting the hours of idle internet scrolling to our personal passions. Maybe we want to do all of them and more. And that’s a good starting point, but it’s not a long term solution.
I’ve made several “reboots” over the last decade. My latest began in October of 2022, when I resolved to begin losing weight, among other changes. The fact that this has not been my first weight loss journey should tell you everything you need to know about the previous ones, but the short answer is that I lacked a couple of key practices:
Identifying my why
Creating actionable goals
Building foundational habits
Most books and blogs you read will put those practices in that order, and that’s all well and good if you’re in a mental state to do the work. But if you’re struggling to begin with identifying your why, which is not uncommon when looking at your life through a lens of negativity, I would argue that it’s okay to begin with goals and put these practices in a 2-3-then-1-2-3 order. Is it technically more work? Yes. But hear me out: for those of us who don’t always think linearly, this can be a great boon to our work on ourselves.
Continuing the current example: I’d done this before. Maybe I had, quote unquote, “failed” then, but I still had my toolkit of individual practices that had worked. I needed an immediate action that I could take that would bring me to a place where I could at least look at myself objectively, instead of through that sense of failure. While it isn’t sustainable, spite can be an awfully powerful motivator to some small wins. I picked two foundational habits to work toward my goal: I subscribed to a meal kit service so that I would be more inclined to prepare meals at home, and I returned to running. More on those and how I build big habits into my routine in a minute.
By February (yeah, I didn’t say this work happened fast), I was ready to begin examining why I felt I needed to lose weight. Although simple on the surface, this is probably the most difficult part of the process of rebooting your routines, and this is why I reiterate that it is okay to wait, or to return to this step throughout your process.
Begin by looking for your inner toddler. Toddlers are famous for asking why. Why do you want to lose weight?
Because my clothes don’t fit and I’m physically uncomfortable in them. Why does it matter that I’m comfortable in my clothes?
Because I’m less likely to go out when I’m only wearing sweats, and going outside is good for my mental health. Because staying sedentary inside my apartment will continue my downward spiral, and being out and active will help resolve it. Because I have clothes and costumes that make me feel powerful, and I cannot currently wear them. Why do I want to feel powerful?
Because positive emotions help me to combat my triggers and keep myself from spiraling. Because as I’ve begun tracking my emotions, I can see the pattern between feeling powerful, getting more done, feeling accomplished, and thus creating a positive cycle that can ultimately replace a negative one. And now we’ve arrived at how losing weight actually improves my overall mental wellbeing, and thus why it is important to me. Finding your why is also a great exercise for connecting to your core values, in my case and in this example a sense of ambition, and finding joy in personal growth.
And thus we return to 2 and 3, creating actionable goals and foundational habits to achieve them. Having now identified that my ultimate need was that powerful feeling of accomplishing something, I was able to fine tune those diet and exercise goals into long term sustainable practices. So if the goal is to eat better, one foundational habit I started with was to log my meals to be mindful of what I had eaten in a day. I built on top of that mindful eating practice to stop snacking idly, and on top of that to replace my nervous or bored eating with increasing my water intake. For my workout goals, I began with a practice of running for 10 minutes three times a week, to 20 minutes, to 30 and now 40 or more. As that’s become habitual, I’ve begun adding additional 10, 15, 20 minute practices of other disciplines on the days I’m not running. And returning to our why, I am looking for more of those specific positive feelings by experimenting with new workouts, seeking what will make me feel the most powerful when I’ve completed it.
If you need help getting started on your own reboot, whether it be for physical health, mindfulness, or any other self-care practice, I recommend the Silk&Sonder journals. One of the great benefits I’ve found in using these is that they provide both a monthly habit tracker — let’s take how the above example is showing up in my June journal, as closing all three rings on my Apple Watch — as well as weekly habit trackers, wherein you can break your goal habit into those foundational habits, such as run three times a week. They also provide freeform bullet journaling space ideal for building a mind map and getting to your why’s.
Happy planning, and remember — don’t be afraid to let your inner child ask the tough questions!