HOW TO START BUILDING A NEW (POSITIVE) HABIT
Your life today is essentially the some of your habits. How happy or unhappy are you? – a result of your habits. In psychology, the process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. Understanding these is crucial to learning how to improve aspects of your daily life. In short, the queue triggers a craving, which motivates a response, which provides a reward, which satisfies the craving, and, ultimately becomes associated with the cue.
Together, these four steps forming neurological feedback loop that will ultimately allow you to create automatic habits. You can transform the four steps into a practical framework that you can use design good habits and eliminate bad ones. It’s called the Four Laws of Behavior Change (James Clear provides a beautiful article summary on this). You can think of each as a lever that influences human behavior. When the levers are in the right positions, creating good habits become effortless.
In my personal life, exercise is a key aspect to me functioning successfully each day to reduce my pain, give me energy, keep flexible, not gain weight, and stay healthy.
There are so many preventive and wellness care techniques I engage in every day as a quadriplegic including, but not limited to nutrition, exercise, mindset exercises, work, advocacy, etc.
Each morning I wake up at 5 AM and then at 6:30 AM after my caregiving duties, I engage in exercise 6 days a week between 60 – 90 minutes each day. I do a cardio workout, weights, bike, range of motion exercises, electrical stimulation, and then a 20 minutes dance party for myself each day for my mental wellness.
In the video below I show you a few of my workouts to get you started and I will show you the rest as time goes on.
- VitaGlide – Cardiovascular rowing machine
- RT 300 Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike – This is an incredible bike that allows you to engage in electrical stimulation (stimulating paralyzed muscles to promote potential functional recovery for those with incomplete injuries, increasing circulation, reducing spasticity, improving blood flow, etc.)
Exercise is so important for so many reasons that we all are intimately aware of, but so many don’t take the time out of their day. Listen, I get it, we all have busy lives. However, if you choose to make time for something you will make time for it. It’s as simple as that. It is a choice only you can make.
If you’re not ready to work out, then you probably won’t do it no matter how much peer pressure you get. I just wanted to introduce those who may not have seen these pieces of equipment before to some of my daily life behind the scenes.
