Not giving up: new habits to hang on to

A FRESH OUTLOOK Which of our new routines and practices will become part of our lives for good? By Anna Tyzack

For Goldie Hawn it’s trampolining; Reese Witherspoon has taken up watercolours, Dame Judi Dench is learning the sonnets and Oprah Winfrey has learnt to change her own bed sheets. Selfimprovement has been the positive side effect of the coronavirus lockdown and, according to a survey of around 2,000 adults, almost half of us are hoping to keep up our shiny new habits once we’re released.

Yet if normality really does return, how easy will it be to continue the daily rituals of breadmaking, virtual fitness classes and mindful walking? According to Julia Samuel, a psychotherapist and counsellor, who has taken up long-distance cycling during lockdown, we have been madly putting our energies into doing things we can have control over.

“Faced with no structure in our lives, we have turned to things that we can start and finish,” she explains. “A lot of people have turned into Fifties housewives.”

The fact is, she continues, that it’s going to be very hard to continue our newfound skills once choice has returned to our lives.

She’s enjoying cycling into the countryside every day she’s got nowhere else to be, but she’s not sure she’ll be so keen in the depths of winter when she can go for coffee with a friend. “It’s going to difficult not to default back to what’s familiar,” she says.

Mariella Frostrup, however, who has been making her Radio 4 Open

Book show from her daughter’s old bedroom, hopes that the world will have changed enough for us to continue with at least some of our lockdown self-betterment.

“I hope employers will realise now that they can trust people with the responsibility of working from home,” she says. “If it’s a choice between Zoom and travelling to London and back for three meetings, I’ll take Zoom and spend more time at home.”

Given there are likely to be social restrictions in place for months to come, our true commitment to our new yoga practice or early evening martinis on the balcony, might not be properly tested for a while.

Still, if we want our habits to be part of who we are by the time lockdown lifts, we’re going to have to keep going with them, says Samuel, whose new book, This Too Shall Pass: Stories of Change, Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings, came out earlier this year. “Take action, do the work, it won’t just happen,” she says. “A habit takes two to three months before it’s ingrained.”

And when you find yourself fishing around for a get-out, you need to remind yourself of three letters, she adds: JDI – just do it.