Tiny leaps: slow and messy habit building

Growing one step at a time, moving with the waves & how I built a writing habit by just writing for 5 minutes at a time

Hello, I’m Philippine and to be honest, I feel like a beginner at life – I am forever trying to make sense of it. You can find my attempts at this, plus reflections, musings and experiences right here, in my newsletter. Subscribing is free! For everyone who feels like a beginner at life, and wants to connect in some way.

I have been sensing my way through habit building. It took me years to build my habit of daily walks. It took me many attempts at journaling for it to stick. And I have many many failed attempts on my record of trying to do it all, to implement all good healthy habits, or at least a lot of them, all at once. I am now learning that slow, gradual, and messy is the way to go.

But oh my goodness this is hard! I get way too excited to limit myself to one tiny change. I want to change my entire life, make it better, and grow who I am. In this regard, change is my thing. Don’t get me wrong though, a sudden change that comes from outside of myself, another person or just life, I find very hard to process. Depending on the impact of it on my life and depending on my mood and energy level, I may or may not get anxious, angry or have a full blown meltdown or shutdown if it’s really bad.

Nevertheless, the idea of changing myself or my life because I want to, excites me almost daily. This applies to tiny and massive changes, and everything in between. I see a video in which someone uses a visual timer, and I get excited. I listen to a podcast about strength training and it’s suddenly a big priority to start doing bodyweight exercises. It’s not that I’ll just go for anything on a whim. Quite the opposite. I’ll think about these things constantly for a while. Yet there is also an incredibly impatient part of me that wants to order the timer immediately, and some protein powder for my muscles too.

I think it comes down to one big love for – or call it obsession with, if you will – developing my life and self: improvement, growth, wellbeing, enjoyment, meaning, fun, etc. In a way it’s what my newsletter is all about: how do I live a good life? Or even just: how to live? Maybe that timer will do the trick, maybe taking the time to acknowledge and allow my feelings, or daily journaling, meditation, finding my purpose, and so on.

Just to be clear, it’s not that I think we all need to constantly be bettering our lives and selves. In fact, accepting yourself and your life is probably the most pure form of growth, and it’s certainly something I am trying to do, again and again, failing often but not always. Moreover, and crucially, my preoccupation with development and the question of how to live at its core does not come from fear, duty or not good enoughness (although they do sometimes creep in, but that’s a conversation for another time), instead it comes from curiosity, enthusiasm and love.

So none of this is a bad thing, it’s wonderful. Occupying myself with this sort of thing makes me happy, and my plans are often things that will indeed do me good in some way. However, my excitement often grows so strong that it gets ahead of itself, wanting to implement everything at once and perfectly.

This, I have found repeatedly, does not work. It’s like giving a pot of daffodils too much water: they shoot right up, to then collapse instead of flourish. And just like that, my excitement and motivation will, either slowly or suddenly, collapse, plus my willpower will run out very quickly, unable to keep up with the amount of changes I’m trying to make. That this is not how it works, I’ve actually known for a while, but my excitement usually runs off anyway. Lately, however, I’ve had some (small) successes.

In January I had a bout of flu that I didn’t seem to be able to shake. I had just started going to the gym and I was so ready to keep going with it. I was also doing quite a lot of other things (to be honest I can’t remember what exactly) – which means a lot as I’m still recovering from chronic fatigue (burnout and long Covid). Then I got my period, and then I got sick. A high fever, a sore throat super deluxe, basically just the whole shebang. The fever didn’t stay for more than a few days, but overall it took me weeks to feel, let’s say ‘not ill’ anymore. I truly wasn’t sick any longer, but I didn’t feel ready to resume normal life either, not at all. It’s only now really, that with hindsight I can say that that feeling is behind me.

For weeks I spent a large part of my days on the sofa watching telly. This frustrated me, and yet something was different about it this time – this time, because I’ve been in that position a lot over the last few years of recovery. I allowed myself to come out of it organically, one small step at a time. I didn’t force myself back into normal life. I still went for my daily walks (that is after I’d recovered from the acute illness of course), so I wasn’t worried about slipping into a depression or something of the sort. I told myself I didn’t need to feel guilty or push myself – although of course sometimes I felt like I should – I could wait till it naturally felt right to take another step away from the sofa and telly.

Then I started to draw, which I never did and which I’m no good at, but it was something. And then I started to write. I had been wanting to build the habit of writing more and to eventually start writing on Substack, but it had always felt so big. When I had told myself that I could/should spend some time writing, in my head ‘some time’ meant an hour or even hours. This felt so daunting, that most of the time I then decided not to write, as I didn’t feel up to it, too tired, not in the right mood, etc. Yet now I somehow managed to recognise this assumption of how long to write for, and came up with a solution. What if I only had to write for five minutes?

And so it happened, that when I was still spending a lot of my time on the sofa watching telly, every now and again I got a different screen out. I stayed on the sofa, but with my laptop on my lap and a timer set for five minutes – yes indeed, that visual timer I was talking about before – I wrote, sometimes for longer, sometimes just for those five minutes, but I was doing it, I was writing!

Slowly I started to do it more often, until I was writing most days. Right now I do it for twenty minutes minimum almost daily, and at a desk instead of on the sofa. I’m aiming to extend that even further or to get to two sessions a day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon (or maybe even evening?), but I’m not there yet. I’m not rushing myself. I’ve done that before – many times – before my five minute experiment, and it didn’t work out. Nevertheless, I’m glad I did try so often, even if it meant rushing myself, because otherwise I wouldn’t have truly learnt – felt in my bones – the lesson to slow down.

The most important thing I learnt though, has been to let it be messy. To try again even if it has been months or years. For example, I used to think that journaling daily just wasn’t for me, because I’d tried so many times without lasting success. And it’s only because I tried again and again that I’ve gotten to a place right now where it seems to be sticking.

Still, messiness is the key word here, not persistence. I’ll explain what I mean. Persistence implies a stubbornness to keep going no matter what. Now of course in order to successfully implement a new habit it’s necessary to persevere. However, to keep going at any cost isn’t helpful here. In fact, it will only create greater resistance, requiring ever greater willpower, which will run out.

I think it’s a matter of nudging, not forcing yourself. In other words, the true challenge here is to find, or rather constantly be seeking, a balance between on the one hand nudging when and where you can, and on the other hand moving with, embracing, the pushback intentionally when you need to, meaning it needs to be the right, but not the perfect time, to nudge, implement and persevere. And this is indeed a very messy ‘trial and error’ process, but apparently that is exactly the way to go.

This lesson, I find, is not only even more profound than the one to take a slow and gradual approach to habit building and growth, it is also much harder to learn and to continuously hold onto. For truly living this insight of messiness means to let go of control. It requires me to relinquish the control of when, how quickly, and in what way which habits are to be built. And this I find perhaps the hardest to do in life in general – letting go.

However, surrendering and letting go of control, is precisely what gives me true power. Perhaps not as much control as I’d like, yet real, instead of a false sense of it, and therefore all the better. I cannot access this control, though, when I try to have full power; I can only access this control when I accept how limited my power actually is, and when I use my intuition to sense, when to restrain myself, when to persevere, to nudge, and how to move with the waves. It’s all about taking a small step and sensing how that feels, then based on that, taking another step, or waiting or even taking a step back. In other words, I am not so much initiating as I am responding to what I feel.

I’ve naturally and slowly learnt these lessons over the last few years, but when I read Emma Gannons post a little while ago on how not to burn out again, something she said suddenly made it crystal clear for me, as if the insights that I had gained had suddenly become tangible. She quotes Martha Beck, who speaks about ‘inching in slowly’ with regards to the process of trusting new people. Emma applies this to rebuilding a relationship with work, and now I am saying that this advice holds for building habits too, and probably everything in life, is my guess. ‘Inching in slowly’ – yes, that’s what it is.

So I don’t think I should have just persisted with journaling, meditating or whatever else when I tried to build these habits before. The only thing I’d change is to intentionally tune into my antennae, as it were, much earlier and more fully than I did. This, however, is what I intend to do from now on – to carve my path by sensing my way through.

How do you build, and fail to build, new habits? And do you get just as excited as I do, making it almost impossible to restrain yourself?

In this post you can find out a little bit more about me and my journey.