The Importance of Making Habits
As I mentioned on my Band posting last week, I changed the ‘exercise’ part of my project from walking to a workout video. Usually, I would walk around my town for about 30-40 minutes and although that was very relaxing, it didn’t really feel like I was exercising. Instead, I’m following a home-training workout video by 땅끄부부 titled ‘the best workouts to lose weight in a short period.’ At first, I could only do the first 20 minutes of the video and even that was so difficult because the video is very intense. However, I slowly increased the time by 5 minutes every day and by one week I was (barely) able to finish the full 35-minute video.
When we try to build muscle, we start with lighter weight and slowly increase it over time. For example, I might do arm workouts with just 2kg, then 5kg the next week, and so on. At times, we’re so excited to build muscle that we start with too much weight and overexert ourselves. I found out that I do this not only with exercising but with things like studying and my hobbies. I keep a picture of the end goal in my mind to motivate myself, such as getting good grades or losing weight, but force myself to work too hard at the beginning that I end up giving up. As I wrote in my ’They Say I Say’ essay: these small, seemingly insignificant changes are what stick as habits, and they make a huge difference in the long run. Even with my 20% Time project, I’m planning to start incorporating reading and exercising into my daily life so that it will naturally become my habits and I realized that I need to focus on the little steps.
I have to admit, making these habits have changed my life significantly. Trying to make time for other things motivated me to make time tables for myself and stay productive. I realized that I waste so much time just daydreaming or going on my phone. Instead, I started to assign a set period of time to study and time to exercise, read, or sleep. It shows that there are so little hours in a day, and that I should use every single minute and hour to the fullest. Although I’m far from completely beating procrastination and being productive regularly, it feels like I have improved my time management abilities than before doing this project.
