Many people fail or refuse to begin good habits and to change themselves. They don’t practice daily habits or have a morning routine because they feel they don’t have enough time or that it’s even worth it, and instead they roll out of bed as late as they can and then begin chasing the day, continuously feeling behind, scatterbrained, and frazzled. You can stop being that person.
“I don’t have time” is a common excuse used to justify complacency. Habits are a daily practice and the truth is they take up very of your little time. If you frequently sleep in late, use social media a lot, watch shows or movies, and go out with friends, then you most certainly have the time to implement daily habits.
One Hour of Daily Habits
Deep breathing, purposeful meditation, and writing exercises are three powerful habits to begin your day with. Each habit should take no more than 20 minutes, for a total of an hour, and they will empower you to feel awake, present, centered, grateful for your life, in control of your life, confident in your ability to make change and offer value, and certain in your life’s purpose and who you want to be each day.
Deep breathing exercises and practices wake you up, energize you, bring you present to the moment, de-stress and relax you, teach you proper diaphragmatic breathing into your belly, improve your posture, and makes you feel alive and present to reality. Take a look at the handful of deep breathing exercises and energizing warm-ups meant for invigorating and empowering you.
Once you’ve woken yourself up and energized yourself with 20 minutes of deep breathing exercises you can then move on to meditation. Meditation helps bring you to a state of being grounded, present, and fully awake. I find that incorporating gratitude, imagining all that you have in your life, and visualizing about past memories, loved ones, and who you want to be and what mark you want to leave on the lives of others puts you in a state of mind of enormous appreciation and inspiration to take control of your life and to not waste your precious time here on Earth. I suggest switching between guided meditations and doing it on your own, the internet is filled with valuable tools for meditating.
Once you’ve finished both deep breathing and meditating you should be in state of focused calm where you’ll be at ease and on your purpose. From here I love to spend another 20 minutes on writing exercises geared towards self-discovery, probing the truth out of your subconscious, and analyzing yourself in a way that pushes you to become your best self. You take a set of 4 to 5 incomplete sentence stems such as “If I operate 5% more self-assertively today….” and write out without thinking or stopping 6 to 10 endings. These exercises were designed by the father of self-help, and 1960s libertarian activist, Nathaniel Branden, who designed programs using various sets of sentence stems every day for several weeks. These writing exercises are amazing for revealing the truths that you hide from yourself, analyzing your past actions and failures, and establishing a clear understanding of who you want to be and how you want to act.
Committing to these three habits, or any one one of them for that matter, will transform you. You will change into a different person who thinks differently and sees and navigates the world in a different manner. If becoming your best self, confident, self-aware, motivated, energized, wise, and at peace with yourself is something you wish for or are striving after, I highly recommend committing yourself to practicing these three life-changing habits.