What's a good habit you developed you'd like to share?

I take a break from caffeine for a week every two months. I do the same with alcohol every month. It helps me stay objective about the amount I'm consuming. It helped me cut way back from pandemic-levels of coffee especially. Hoo, boy, I was one jittery, confined ball of anxiety and despair.

Pro tip: don't schedule both during the same week.

Having a place for things. Never having to look for "x". Keys, wallet, which type of utensil goes in which slot in the silverware holder. I have saved so much time, avoided problems and given myself mental breaks by simply putting things where they're needed and being consistent.

Never use your phone in bed.

CBT (Cognitive behavior therapy). Get your your mind to associate bed with sleep, not with phone stimulation.

Force yourself to sneeze and cough inside your elbow all the time. Even when you're alone. Then it becomes a reflex and you'll protect those around you from infection a lot better.

Drink a glass of water upon waking up.

Twenty years ago someone mentioned this to me, how the body tends to be dehydrated upon waking and that’s part of why waking up sucks.

Since then I’ve been drinking a glass of water almost immediately after waking up.

Putting stuff in a calendar. Now that I've started doing it, I'm not sure how people live without it. I have too much stuff going on to remember exactly when things are happening and some of them are scheduled weeks or months in advance. Everything has to go in the calendar app. For things that are further out, I set reminders one week and one day before. Other than that, I also check at the start of every week, and ofc I check whenever I need to schedule something.

Kinda a boring one but gym. Started a couple of years ago once a week and had to drag myself there but after a month or two of that something flipped and now I go almost every day. It's pretty fun and it's great to notice the change in myself over the last couple of years. Now just need to do something about diet and sleep.

Journaling.
It's extremely powerful from mental health to actual planning tasks and keeping track of things but weirdly enough it can be difficult to get into.

My best advice would be to make it as easy and as low stakes as possible at the beginning. Just open file/journal and write anything every day, even if it's one word. Don't worry about anything else. Then you can add and evolve this habbit to whatever feels useful to you.

Flossing I guess.

When I feel bad, I clean. If I'm going to feel like crap anyway, might as well get some use out of it.

Listening to audiobooks!

I always listen to podcasts and audiobooks while I am driving to office :D

Paying attention to what you're doing. Sounds simple but so many people don't do it. They just keep doing the same thing and act surprised when it never works. If you pay attention to what you do and the outcome of your actions, you can improve everything you do and become very efficient.

Walking places instead of driving.

Meditating

Drinking a couple glasses of water immediately when I wake up.

Wakes me up, gets rid of the tired dont-wanna-open eyes.

I do squats when I craft video game items. One squat per item. Thousands of squats at this point but still playing just as much so win win in my book. My ass is getting bigger!

Before I sit down on the toilet, I take a piece of toilet paper en wipe the brim. Not that it makes that much of a difference of how clean the brim is. But since doing that I ALWAYS notice if the roll's nearly empty. It's just the heads up you need to check stock and fix a new one before it's too late.

I have a hat.

The hat goes on when I leave the house or leave the office. Putting the hat on triggers me to stop for one second and actually think "Do I have everything I should have?" If I make it out of the house without the hat, I spend a proper minute or two double checking that I have everything because if I can forget the hat, I could forget anything.

Each day, I have a reminder shoot off on all my devices to think of three things for which I'm grateful. Today's list:

-1. I get to wfh today (we're hybrid)

-2. I don't look like Andrew Tate (pic of him in last post where I commented; what a toad)

-3. The vase didn't shatter when a kitty knocked it off the table eating flowers

(Lemmy wanted to be stupid about how it formatted my numbered list, that's why the hyphens to stop it from mangling the list.)

petting a cat or a dog when you start to get agitated during a phone call

I stopped using antiseptic mouthwash, even zero-alcohol versions, because the microbes in your mouth produce nitric-oxide and killing them off might be linked to high blood pressure.

learn from the mistakes of others

Writing down car maintenance logs

It was not easy to train, nor to keep, but meditation upon waking is vital to me now. I find whatever my biggest struggles are, money, relationships, work stress, family… those anxiety demons are waiting to pounce upon waking. If not, my phone will deliver fresh demons. So I claim my mind as my own before allowing any other influences to set a tone for the day. Start with a 10 minute guided practice from a voice you trust easily. Go from there.

Get in the habit of getting into habits. My high school chemistry teacher turned me onto this. Make a point of doing something every day for a while and soon it will become hard NOT to do it.

I now do 30-45 strength training at home 3 times a week, and 2 short 15m sessions of HIIT. I spread it throughout the day as an addition to my lifestyle (between meetings, when showering the kiddo, etc) with a tiny investment in equipment and no real impact on leisure time.

It's part of a change to deal with a very unexpected type 2 diabetes diagnosis and it's had an outsized impact on my health for the effort.

Coupled with weight loss - Blood pressure, cholesterol, heart rate and blood sugar have all dropped significantly within 3 months. Would recommend, exercise for health doesn't mean grueling classes, stupid long workouts, or 20 hours of cardio a week. Downside, an utterly ridiculous amount of misinformation online.

Taking a full breath of air before chugging liquids. I accidentally exhaled before choking on some water once, body naturally tried to pull in air and got more water. Very much felt like drowning.

Flossing every day. Never had issues with my gums ever since.

When walking by / through vehicles in a parking lot with things in my hands, I will make the conscious effort to pull my arms close to my body and prevent them swaying or moving with my normal walk. As well as moving items from one hand to the other if the car is on the side that was holding them. Nobody likes scratches and dings!

I start everyday by slamming a 16 ounce glass of water. It sets up my day to be more alert and on top of things.

I started washing up straight after eating. So much better.

Taking a shit at 3AM.

If I ever remove the spare tire from my car, I put air in it.

Probably not super helpful since most people don't ever remove their spares or work on cars AND many new cars don't even come with spares. But it helps me.

I use org-mode to maintain a todo list. A very important detail. All todo must have a schedule or deadline.

Every time I open my editor it shows the agenda view that present me the list of tasks to do today and the ones I haven’t completed in the past.

Mainly, if you can have a similar habit it will work as a meta habit that will improve and grow other time.

Plus org-mode can do so much more, this becomes really useful. Like help with creating new habits, write dynamic documents, etc… I wrote an article about my workflow here https://yannesposito.com/posts/0015-how-i-use-org-mode/index.html

org mode