Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Get back to good habits as life returns to normal
As life slowly returns to normal, it’s time to retrain your body and mind
With summer camps around the corner and the likelihood of schools getting back on track in the fall, there’s a high likelihood that those of us who are parents will be working our way back to life as it once was pre-pandemic.
Many good habits that took you years to build up might have come undone in the past year as you shifted focus to the well-being of your family at home. Now you might be feeling a sense of overwhelm as you begin to consider how to piece everything back together again.
Most are aware that good habits, such as daily exercise, meditation, journaling and clean eating can benefit our overall well-being, but they are so much easier said than done. We also know that during high-stress times, like a global pandemic, it can be easy to run off course and pick up some bad habits along the way that you’re now looking to undo.
The idea of how to best form new habits and break bad ones is clearly a topic that resonates with people given the book “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” by James Clear (Random House) has sold over 4 million copies worldwide since it was published in 2018.
In the book, Clear provides actionable steps to help readers who are in search of ways to improve their lives. The overall idea is that making tiny changes in our lives can lead to impactful results. He teaches how to overcome a lack of motivation and willpower, how to make time for new habits even when life is hectic and how to get back on track when you get off course, along with many other self-improvement strategies.
According to Clear, the problem isn’t you, but the system you’re using.
This is one of the core philosophies of the book shared on James Clear’s website: “Bad habits repeat themselves, not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.”
A more local perspective on the concept of making and breaking habits was shared by Chinyelu Kunz, the founder of We Nurture Collective, Downingtown, who is a parenting coach and was an early childhood educator for 25 years.
Kunz said the establishment of good habits can have a positive impact on many aspects of our lives.
“We have to be the one to establish good habits for ourselves and then these good habits will put us in a better mood and help us to better face those challenges as they pop up, help us organize our day, help us have clearer thinking, be more balanced,” Kunz says. “It
will help us be in better control of our emotions.”
In contrast, when we’re all out of sorts we set a mood that can interrupt the smooth functioning of not only our personal lives but also that of our family.
“It just seeps everywhere,” Kunz said. “If our child and we are out of sorts, things tend to go downhill. Family life is so affected by us as parents — we set the tone.”
Kunz said that good habits help us be more positive, leading to a more positive outlook on life.
“When we have established those foundations in our lives and our routine, our rhythm flowers around that — those anchors in the day,” Kunz said. “We are more the captain of our ship and we know what to expect when we meet up with those anchors.”
Kunz refers to rhythm, also known as a routine, as the systematic things we do in our daily lives that can be expected and ground us. Daily habits are the pieces that make up the rhythm of our days.
“Rhythm is so healing and gives us strength,” she said.
As a starting point to the overwhelming task of getting one’s life back on track, Kunz suggests parents should create a rhythm for their own self-care needs by carving out even five minutes a few times a day — morning, afternoon and evening — to focus on you.
“Without rhythm, life can be very chaotic and you are less the captain of our own ship and then you’re being blown by the wind,” Kunz said.
The next step is thinking about what you are going to do with that time for yourself. To help determine that, Kunz recommends breaking things down further
into different areas of need, such as physical self-care, emotional self-care, social self-care, spiritual self-care and creative self-care.
“The physical self-care is thinking about what you can do to really take care of your physical body,” she said, adding the answer might be a walk or a bath in the evening before going to bed.
Kunz refers to emotional selfcare as providing time for yourself where you can go more internally and allow yourself to release feelings on a piece of paper, for example.
“You are writing out those feelings there and looking to take care of your emotional self,” she said.
When considering your social self-care needs, you want to check in with yourself to see if you are taking care of that need to connect with others.
The overall idea Kunz recommends is tapping into these various areas of need within yourself to help you determine, with intention, what will be some worthy habits to establish in your life.
“People are really looking at the phrase “self-care” and are thinking of it more as care of the soul,” she said. “The nourishment or nurturing we are giving ourselves and combining that with self-care practice.”
If you need help in determining one good habit to get you started, Kunz suggests beginning with the daily practice of journaling as a way to ground and connect to yourself.
“Purchase a journal and in the morning before starting your day write down how you feel — acknowledge how you feel and write words of gratitude or hopes for the day or next hour,” she said. “I feel that how we start our day really sets our tone.”
Overall, Kunz suggests we should consider our good habits and how they serve us well.
If bad habits have been established, she suggests identifying those we would like to transform and then evaluating them. The next step is to release judgment and the final one is to restart.
“If bad habits have been established, then a person could go right to the very beginning and begin to look at ways they need to take care of themselves — right back to that physical, emotional self-care and begin to journal about that specifically,” she said.
According to Kunz, considering how the bad habit makes you feel, how you want to feel, and then releasing any judgment will enable you to let go and move forward.
“The releasing of it can work once you realize how you want to feel,” she said. “I think strength comes through that continual practice.”
“Bad habits repeat themselves, not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.” — James Clear, author of “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones”