It’s astonishing how quickly you can abandon a good habit.
I spent the fall and winter building one small but important habit: lifting free weights for 10-15 minutes, three or four times a week. I want to be a healthy person, and I know that as I age, my risk of developing osteoporosis increases. Plus I don’t want to develop too much floppy flesh under my arms. Some moderate weight training can help prevent (or at least delay) both those developments.
It took me a while to figure out how to make the weight training a habit, but after hearing a podcast interview with James Clear, author of the book Atomic Habits, I decided to try his tactic of habit stacking. Habit stacking involves linking a current habit to a habit I need to build.
In my case, I wash my hair every other day, and I like to let it air dry for 10 or 15 minutes before I finish it off with the blow dryer. Voila: the perfect habit to stack with my weight training.
I used another James Clear strategy to boost my motivation to lift weights a bit more. Clear advocates temptation bundling: linking the thing you need to do to an activity you want to do. I like to listen to audiobooks and podcasts when I’m exercising. I do this on my daily walk, so I decided that I’d also put in my earbuds and listen while I lifted weights and air dried my hair.
It was working really well. Thanks to the podcast listening, the time I spent lifting did not feel tedious. I was training with my weights at least three times a week. I had been gradually able to ratchet up the size of my free weights and the number of reps in each set. The increase in my upper body strength was noticeable—to me, at least—in my yoga classes, and my arms seemed a bit firmer.
And then in March, it all fell apart. In March my husband and I moved. For a couple of weeks, I was lifting LOTS of weight as I lugged boxes from house to house and room to room. My routines were all disrupted as we settled in, and we figured out where to locate activities in the new house. For the first month, my free weights lived in the garage.
I’d like to tell you that toting all those boxes kept my upper body in shape, but it did not. In yoga class, I noticed that plank pose was a lot harder. The skin under my arms was noticeably more jiggly. (Ugh.)
In late April, I finally hauled the weights inside and stashed them in my office. I walked past them every day thinking “I need to lift weights. I’ll do it later—after I finish this or that task.” But most days, I didn’t get around to lifting the weights.
I’ve finally started lifting again, but I’m having trouble making it an automatic part of my routine. So I dipped back into Clear’s work for tips on how to get back on track. Clear says it’s important to design an environment that promotes success. For example, he says that if you want to make practicing your musical instrument a habit, you should put it in the middle of the living room.
At our old house, the weights lived in a large office space just outside the master bedroom. After I washed my hair, the weights were in plain sight right outside the bedroom door, reminding me to get to work while my hair dried. In other words, I had designed an environment to facilitate my weight training.
At the new house, the master bedroom is at the opposite end of the house from the office where my weights have been living. Since we moved, I’ve been occupying that ten minutes of air drying time by picking up whatever novel I’m reading at the moment. Obviously, I’m enjoying the reading, but it is not helping me re-establish my healthy habit. I think it’s time to move the weights to the bedroom where they will remind me every time I’m air drying my hair that I need to do a little weight lifting.
What about you? What can you do to get back on track with a healthy habit? Can you do some habit stacking, linking a current habit to a new one? Or some temptation bundling, linking the thing you need to do with an activity you want to do? Or perhaps you just need to tweak your environment a bit.
Someone do me a favor: in six weeks, ask me how I’m doing on the weight training. Accountability partners are also effective tools for building good habits.