Laura Kirby

The secret to your success will be found in your daily habits. The things you do every day without even thinking – on autopilot. But the good news is you can change those habits any time.

It’s a lot easier to add a daily habit to your routine than to take something away. So for example if you’re starting to try to lose weight it’s easier to add in “drinking 2.5 litres of water” or “eating 8 portions of fruit and vegetables” to your day, than trying to take a habit away such as “no more snacking” or “no sugar”. If you replace the bad habits with good ones it’s a lot easier to stick to.

Some examples of good daily habits to add into your day are:

Meditation every morning/night. I don’t care who you are, everyone needs to meditate. 5-10 minutes is all it takes.
Drinking more water. Half your body weight in lbs, convert that to fluid oz and that’s how much your body needs.
Sleeping for 8 hours every night.
Moving your body for 30-60 minutes a day.
Reading 5-10 pages of a book every day.

These are all obviously beneficial habits, and they are easy to incorporate into your life. But you have to start at day 1. Research says that doing something every day for 21 days forms a new habit. I have found that to be true.

I started meditating daily on the 10th of February 2019 and have been making it a daily practice ever since. At the time of writing 170 consecutive days. Now I couldn’t imagine going without it, but for the first three weeks I had to put the work into forming this new habit.

The same can be applied to any daily habit. If you want to eat healthier food, exercise more, learn more…start with day 1. And then day 2. And promise yourself you will keep going until day 21. Give yourself a reward if that’s likely to make you stick with it.

But when you get to day 21 if you like this new habit, if you like how much better you feel after 8 hours sleep or 2 litres of water a day…then keep the habit up!!

What’s better….eating a bag of carrots on a Wednesday and junk the rest of the week, or eating some vegetables with every dinner for a week? The latter of course. So the same goes for anything. The small things you do every day add up to huge results.

The benefits I’ve experienced from a regular meditation practice are incredible, but I did not experience them all on day 3.

The next habit I’m adding in is the correct amount of water. Yes I prefer coffee or diet coke, but I know if I can just drink the water for 21 days my body will get so used to it I’ll start to crave it instead of coffee. Then I’ll add in something else.

And maybe when I get to day 170 of drinking 80 fluid oz (10 glasses!) of water a day I’ll write another blog post.

Today is day 1, because I decided it was. Just like you can.