We Are All Creatures Of Habit!

I had an email last week from an individual who loved our article about getting a good night’s sleep but was worried about becoming over-reliant on guided sleep meditations.

This was my response:

“We are creatures of habit, so we can form reactive habits to certain triggers but we can also train ourselves out of them [with practice].

Just like when you were a child and you couldn’t sleep without the light on, your mother, a comfort blanket, a dummy, sucking your thumb or being rocked, you ‘grew out’ of these habits with practice.

The same goes with exercise, diets and meditation.

Unless you have a specific condition that needs addressing explicitly, you can force new, beneficial habits.

It does take a little time and people nowadays are often impatient, which is why they think it’s impossible, but it can be done!

If it was me, I would practice without the guided meditation. If you’ve been listening to it every night, you probably know it by heart anyway now… Just do it yourself.”

The moral of the story…

If you want to lose weight, create a habit of planning your meals every evening in the kitchen.

If you want to get in shape, create a habit of going to the gym every day after work.

If you want to become more consciously aware, create a habit of meditating every morning in your bedroom.

Make habits easy to stick to – set reminders, create special locations, join a gym that is on the way home from work, wake up 15 minutes earlier.

The easier it is to practice, the more likely you are to stick with it and once you have done it for so long, such habits become second nature!

“Grease the groove” as our friend Pavel says!