October 13, 2024
Hey there, my name is Shannon Gail Harden. I have been interested in how brains work
and in the many facets of health my whole life and have followed those interests into a
career as a health coach.
Today I want to talk about the place where healthy habit forming, and our unique way of
being in the world, meet.
Some of us have experienced times in our lives when we are told that we have a
condition, and we need to make some lifestyle changes. Many of us have had times
where we want to make some lifestyle changes, so we start doing a new thing and then
easily burn out. Sometimes, we can't seem to find the motivation to do the changes that
we know are good for us. It often sounds like what is required to change, and start new
habits, is a very surface level adjustment; just do the things and you will feel and look
better. It then becomes very discouraging when we can't seem to do the things, or we
start doing the things and the things don't stick, or better yet, we come to completely
loath the things.
The secret is, that a lot of our behavior patterns have much deeper roots. Behavior
patterns can be things we do and things we don’t do. If we don’t delve below the surface
of those patterns, if we use or receive fear or shame to motivate a behavior change, or if
we don’t have a support system for ourselves both internally and externally, the change
that we want to make is most likely not going to happen long term and we will often wind
up right back where we started, or even worse off.
So how do we form healthy habits that stick? What do we need to pay attention to in
ourselves to get at those deeper roots? What is next?
I am going to use the example of me and my brain so you can see what I mean about
deeper roots. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child and have more recently really
owned what that means for my daily functioning and needs. I am not a person who
naturally or easily forms healthy habits, organizes, or gets going on routines. In fact, I
often chafe at things that feel routine or "boring" to me. So many of the daily "shoulds"
that come with being a human and a mother can cause me a great deal of frustration. I
get overstimulated easily. I would 1000% rather read a book, go on a meandering hike,
watch a show, write some poetry, engage on Instagram, think about or research
something interesting to me in that moment, have a conversation, hang out with a friend
or be entertained in some way than do the daily maintenance of life. These desires
aren't "bad" things. They are part of what makes me who I am and it keeps me healthy
and happy to get to do them. However, as we all know, normal, daily life tasks must be
accomplished to take care of ourselves and our offspring. As a human with ADHD, I am
dopamine deficient and I can get stuck following the dopamine and getting easily
discouraged by all the daily parts of life that don't produce that for me. What I have
learned however, is that my brain, body, and overall self are so much happier and
regulatable when I AM engaging in the more boring routines and habits that support me
as well as the ones that feel fun. I have learned that I can work with my brain and not
against it when it comes to habits and routines. I have learned that those habits need to
be flexible behaviors that work for and with ME and not the other way around. I don’t
need to prove anything by keeping the habits. The habits are there for my unique
support and betterment and therefore are going to be personalized to my way of being
in the world.
So, with my specific brain, and the fact that I was also raised in high control religion and
was not very in touch with my needs and intuition for a long time, I now have a very
strong autonomy drive. Especially now that I have done some inner work (and quite a
bit of good ol' therapy) to understand myself and my brain and my particular traumas
and strengths, it likes to steer the ship. If I say that I am going to not eat sugar for 30
days, you better believe that after about a week I will break it for sheer rebellion after
being "forced" to do something, even if I, myself, am the one that is doing the enforcing.
It just is. It's how I work, especially in this season of my life. What I need in a habit is
flexibility, a long-term vision, a compassionate voice towards myself, and FUN. Take
those parts out and I will try for a while, burn out, and binge on the opposite-of-the-habit
behavior EVERY SINGLE TIME. I have found that I need to work on realizing when I am
engaging in shame talk towards myself and then replacing it with a compassionate
voice EVERY TIME I work to form a habit. I need to be able to mess up, give up,
change my mind, try again, and rework the habit to make it fit what I need as I progress.
Now, let's talk about these habits. What I want you to listen to is how the things that I do
support me, and then to think about what would best support you. It may also offer a
more flexible framework for the things you are already doing to support you that you
may not have named as healthy habits. A lot of times we have believed the lie that a
good habit, or a healthy habit, has to look really strict in order to "count." For example;
getting up at 5 am to do an hour workout or eating on a strict diet regime and not
“cheating”. NOT SO. You probably have all sorts of healthy routines and habits in place
in your life and can use those to build on in areas that you want to make changes for
yourself.
As you read some of my processes, please apply what pops out at you as personally
useful. Throw the rest out. If your brain works very differently from mine, that is
awesome. You do YOU. There are so many self-help books that highlight the "most
important habits to form" or whatever and frankly, that is usually B.S. We each are
individuals with individual lives, bodies, brains, physiologies, environments, values,
people, and needs. No one else's way of life is going to be the perfect fit for us and it's
just not that helpful to copy paste other people's habits into our lives. Sometimes we will
be inspired to try something or have a spark of motivation happen from hearing another
person's plan and if that's the case, try that idea out! We just aren't shaming anyone into
anything here.
My exercise habit is a good example for me of a long term, flexible habit. I have always
loved moving and exercising. I haven't always loved it for itself, but I have always known
that I feel better mentally, physically, and emotionally when I am consistent with it.
Having four babies in my twenties and thirties did all sorts of things to my body as any
of you who have given birth know. In high school and college, I enjoyed some tennis, Tai
Kuan Do, yoga, Pilates, running and swimming. Then along came triathlons for a while,
hot yoga, weightlifting, HIT workouts and barre classes, hiking and Zumba.
I have experienced chronic neck and back pain, depression, anxiety, post-partum depression, and times where I needed to focus on trauma healing and restructuring my value systems in all sorts of areas. During some of these times I needed to quit certain activities for a good chunk of time or even give them up entirely. There were times where I didn’t do much of anything other than nurse babies and survive the day. As my life has morphed from season to season, I have gotten better at listening to what my body and brain are craving when it comes to exercise and using that as a springboard. My habit and lifestyle vision is that, ” I value exercise, movement, and fun” and in each season I look for the thing that feels fun or helpful to do or try with my body. With young kids, that was fitting in an exercise class a couple times a week or going to the gym or hot yoga 2 or 3 times a week. In a week in my life right now as a mother of school age kids, I might hike a couple times, run once, lift weights a few times, and/or go to yoga or Zumba once. Why? Because I have the privilege of access to national forest up here in Cedar Crest, New Mexico and it basically feeds my soul to go be in it, yoga and lifting weights helps ease my back, jaw and neck tension as well as feels good to do, Zumba is my new fun thing to try as a girl who used to feel too self-conscious to dance, and running is a shout out to my old loves now that I have done enough post-baby pelvic floor work to be able to enjoy it in moderation again. I sometimes make a plan for the week and sometimes I wake up in the morning with a workout time allotted but go with what I am feeling in the moment. Sometimes I have a fun lunch plan to get me thought the workout and often the workout, itself, is very fulfilling, because I am working with my drive for fun, variety and autonomy instead of against it. I get to be spontaneous while also engaging in routine, and that feels like a win-win to my brain.
I have gone through times in my exercise life where I got really exacting with myself. Requiring that do certain things or convinced I I am not doing “enough.” I have shamed myself in the mirror for not being thin enough. I have hyper fixated on what my body looks like and what I need to do to change it. Sometimes this gets activated after seasons of more inactivity; an over fixation on myself as being “fat and out of shape,” and sometimes it is activated when I have been very consistent and start feeling perfectionistic. This is the shaming voice I mentioned. It doesn’t want to let me say that I am ” in shape” no matter how fit I am, because I don’t live up to an ever perfecting “ideal.” I have learned throughout the years to notice when I slip into this place. It isn’t a pleasant place. It takes some time sometimes to move out of, but as I learn to continually check in on what I actually need and want, or what need isn’t being fulfilled, I have gotten better at helping myself through those times. My worth as a human is not based on what my body looks like; my worth is inherent because I exist. My body changes, my body can change, my body will change, in all sorts of different ways and directions. It is actually SUPPOSED to change. Shame and perfectionism do nothing but make me miserable.
Let’s talk about seasons now. I spend a lot of time on physical activity in my day right now. I recently put my kids in school after 11 years of them being home and homeschooled and it opened up some time for me. I decided to devote a lot of it to getting myself to a place where my body is feeling good much more consistently. Habits take time, and we don’t have endless amounts of time, so prioritizing becomes a part of how we form a habit. Some habits can be fit in little corners of our day, some involve a shift in our schedule, and some involve a season of shifting before they fit nicely in a corner. Sometimes we don’t have the time to spare for big shifts, so we form habits accordingly. Exercise over this last year has been a priority for me for all sorts of reasons. Over the summer it all shifted again with my kids out of school, so the habit itself looked different, but having it as a priority and as a vision for myself helped me to shift it to a workable place, instead of me burning out on it or giving it up. I will spend less time on it some weeks, I will do different things with it, but it will be a part of my life in ever-changing ways because it is something I need for my wellbeing, and I have learned to know and value that.
When we are prioritizing one habit, sometimes other ones slow down or are put on hold for a while. Did you know that my house has been a mediocre sort of clean this year, all year? During the spring semester, I would come home from dropping the kids off at school and go straight to exercising. I would make myself lunch, do some dishes, do a little laundry, work on my business, read a book, talk to a friend, go somewhere, all with a whole lot of questionable spaces and systems going on around me. Then during the summer, with the kids around much of the time, I continued the best I could. Did part of me want to spend a whole lot of time organizing and getting everything into more functioning places? Yes! But honestly this wasn’t the season for it. My mental and physical self needed to work out a lot, to hike a lot, to exist at a slower pace than it had been existing for the last 11 years. There is a part of my brain that wants to pass some judgement on this, that tells me I get to rest AFTER all the things are done, but honestly, I am done letting that part rule my inner life. This is MY house. I live in it, I don’t belong to it, and how clean or organized it is is up to me. There is no moral judgement at stake here. I spent a long time trying to wrestle our previous house into submission and feeling terrible about it not being spotless while having tiny babies, and I feel like that stole quite a bit of joy from me and caused a lot of anxiety. I am slowly building up some motivation to tackle some bigger house projects as I work away at the necessities. In the meantime, it is what it is. My people are not worse off for not having a spotless home. It has also made room for my husband to make more cleaning plans of his own apart from me and has lessened the shame I used to feel when he cleaned. I told you I grew up in high control religion, right? The rigid gender roles taught to me were that the home was my “domain,” so it was a moral failing when my home wasn’t clean and “welcoming.” There was so much at stake when in came to my house. It was to be my area of expertise, my area of dominion. So, when my well-meaning partner would pitch in, I would feel even worse about my “abilities” as a home maker, even if I was drowning in children and care chores. Over time I have been able to name this as an unhealthy world view but sometimes the feelings and shame will still pop up. I think this is another reason why I have chosen to prioritize other things over house maintenance this last year. I love a lovely, organized space, but I will not be ruled by that role of homemaker anymore. It’s my home, my safe place, the safe place of the people I love. I will maintain it with them, and sometimes for them, depending on what is going on at the time, but it’s no longer my main “job.” It exists. It is OUR house and home and we are working to make it a useful, fun, healthy, happy space together these days.
I am a firm believer in rest. Sometimes the best thing for a routine is to just not do it. Having a day or two or even a week or two where you don’t do the things can be so reviving, especially if you are able to catch some shame talk that sometimes inevitably speaks up and remind it that you are doing this on purpose and, in fact, doing this fits your value system better than forcing yourself to stick to your routine “no matter what.” In a culture of black and white thinking about health and fitness, where we are often afraid to call ourselves a ” fit” or “healthy” human unless we wear a size 5 or eat only vegetables and not-this-but-that-kind-of-protein, don’t be afraid to own that YOUR version of healthy is what is MOST healthy for YOU. What will support YOU becoming your favorite, most self-aware and balanced-feeling version of yourself? What would feel good to you right now? What would feel like the challenge you are craving or the fun you would love to have? Pick that. Every time.
Now, are there healthy habits that you have to do in order to survive or for your kids to survive? Yes. You will have to obtain food and water at some point. You will need to wash some clothes, clean some things and obtain funds to pay for things. Can we always make these things fun and enjoyable for ourselves? We really can’t. But I do think that we can sometimes tailor and personalize them in ways that make at least some of them more doable and less draining at least some of the time. This, instead of forcing ourselves to do them the way we were raised, or the way society told us they needed to be done. How do WE want to do them? What do we enjoy about those things and how can we play up those parts? As for the parts that feel like drudgery, can we do them differently? Have a reward system for ourselves? Can we streamline them with less steps so that they are not such a big job? For instance, I hate folding laundry. I really do. My mother-in-law has this gorgeous way of thinking about each person as she folds their clothes and that brings her joy as she does it. I love this, and some folks are really going to resonate with some sort of mental meditation like that. If that is your style, do that! What works for me however, is to sort the clothes in the least possibly time I can and dump them in each kid’s drawer. Yup, unfolded. They will stir them when they get home anyways. Sometimes it helps to do it with a show on so I can forget I’m doing laundry. Recently my husband started heading up a pick-a-laundry-day-and-do-your-own-laundry movement in our house that I am ALL for. They will learn to do their laundry and I will have way less to “fold.”
So, when it comes to forming healthy habits for yourself, what are your values about that habit? WHY do you want to have a habit about it? WHAT do you want it to look like, and what do you want it to feel like? HOW do you want to respond to yourself when you don’t stick with your plan? Is your plan rigid or flexible? HOW does your brain and body work and what would be something that works with YOUR physiology instead of against it? Some of these questions take some time and curiosity to answer but I promise you that if you approach a habit or lifestyle change this way instead of a shame driven, “shoulding” sort of way, you are going to have a much easier time forming your habits, responding to times when you don’t do your habits, and hopefully you will have some fun doing it.
As a health coach, this is my main business. Stepping into the mental and physical patterns of your life with you and exploring together what you have learned that you sometimes don’t even know that you know. I’m here to help you get to the root of things and own your value system; to create and realize what you visualize for yourself. I want to support you through the ups and down of your experiments, through all the plans and attempts, and as you get to know yourself, and the way you personally work, in a way that helps you to achieve your hopes and dreams and feel good doing it. You are so worth the time and attention it takes to craft your life in a way that feel good to you, and I would be honored to come with you on that adventure!
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