Healthy eating, excercise/movement and meditation help with depression - I know this to be true for me. Problem is I cannot persist my ‘good’ habits - btw. I have not tried hibernate (yet).
Whenever I start a habit, within three to six weeks (or even a couple of months) I stop doing it. It may be an attitude problem? I seem to ‘simply’ don’t give a f… about this habit anymore!
Right now I am at the point where I no longer trust myself or have the energy to even start some beneficial action - I feel like a phony.
Btw. - after writing the above paragraphs, I went out for a run. So, another attempt, will it fail again and if yes, why? Missing persistence, missing self discipline, missing kicks in my butt???
Hi Mart, do you feel hopelessness and frustration and need more consistency and understanding of your situation?
For me the best motivation is to find what the positive feelings are for an activity, this makes it sustainable in the long term i think
At present i am hoping to create a desktop application which will help maintain positive habits. I could not put a link to github here but if you look for “SunyataZero/well-being-diary” you will find it. It’s still very much a work in progress though
thank you. Had a look at your project, looks promising.
Played with different tools/apps, wrote an app myself - I’m not sure if technology will help in my struggle with persistence. With ‘habit’ apps, it is the same as with movement, I’m gung ho for a a couple of days/weeks and then … nothing.
What I need is a way/trick to kick my own butt when I’m slacking off and use my depression as an excuse.
Anyway, Thank you Tord for making me think about my situation again!!
I use an app called streaks along with general movement data from my Apple Watch. I like streaks because it can pull in other sources like meditation time or water that I drink from Apple Health.
But ya, the app or the streak itself isn’t the trick. I think making the goal super small is a good option. For example, if I have a goal of 5 minutes of meditation, or 5 situps, or 2 glasses of water … it’s easy enough to bust out even when I don’t feel like it. When I do feel like it, I can exceed the goals.
Another concept I follow is to make my bed every morning and that be my first task in the goals I track. It’s easy enough to do and I have a small sense of accomplishment to start my day.
Try registering for a race. I have more motivation for running if I know there’s a payoff in the future. For example this year I registered for the NYC marathon. So during training, everytime I went out for a run I kept thinking about how great it will be to visit New York and finish the race.
I think habits can stick when we find a way to attach them to positive/fun things.
so true! First victory of the day! It’s so ingrained into my waking up that I no longer think about it, I just make my bed. @jon, you just proved to me that I can be persistent. Thanks!
I think the key is repeated restarts even after fallow periods. And not judging or blaming oneself for those times when one wasn’t practicing the habits.
Personally I’ve found that the biggest problem is just forgetfulness, or getting distracted (sometimes intentionally) by something that seems more important at the time. In my experience, the best way to maintain a habit is to have a fixed time and place to do it. For example, the times when I’ve managed to have a regular gym routine, I have a fixed time on certain dates to go the gym and do a certain workout. If I try to go whenever convenient, or keep changing the time, inevitably I’ll come up with something more else to do and at the end of the day have no time left over for the gym. The same goes for meditation: I either do it right after breakfast every day, or it just doesn’t happen.
so true! First victory of the day! It’s so ingrained into my waking up that I no longer think about it, I just make my bed.