Maintaining Good Habits

I’ve never been good with developing positive habits. I could never get into exercise, for example. I had a few years’ worth of traumatic experiences with team sports as a kid, and I guess exercise is too closely associated in my mind with gym class. I just have no positive associations with the actual act of exercise to go on.

I have, however, started going to yoga. And, against all likelihood, I’ve started going at six in the morning. (I’m not a morning person either—did I forget to mention that?). At first I had to drag myself. This is the type of thing I would do once or twice, usually, and then quit. But I’ve been dragging myself every morning for two weeks. And lately I’ve discovered a strange thing.

If I skip a day, my body feels stiff and out of sorts. It’s not so hard to get up anymore, as long as I get to bed early enough. And my body feels really good when it makes those shapes. Is this how it always is with exercise? Is it only just because I never stuck with an exercise regime before for longer than a fortnight that I always hated it? Am I just now discovering something fitness nuts just instinctively know—that exercise is fun?

More to the point: is regular repetition really all it takes to develop these good habits? Does it really get easier?

I could see how this could apply to something like marketing. My marketing routine generally goes something like this: I do it for two weeks, get either the result I needed at the time or lose interest, then I wander off and do other things. Maybe if I stuck with it past that point of boredom, it would become a necessary routine—and not something I feel forced to do.

Maybe I’m learning this relatively late in my life. Maybe persistence really does pay off.