Here's a really good reason to develop better habits today: it's much easier to maintain a habit than to start a new one from scratch.
It's easier to rise every day at 6am than to try to train your body to get up two hours earlier than your normal 8am rising time.
It's easier to write several pages of your book daily than to try to develop a new writing schedule.
It's easier to maintain your weight at 135 than to try to lose that 50 pounds you just put on.
And it's much, much easier to have only a few social glasses of wine on occasion than to cut back on partying every weekend.
How are your habits? Are you doing the things that will help make you a better person or are you nursing a few things that'll lead you to an early grave (smoking), obesity (too much midnight snacking) or decreasing the quality of your life (internalizing anger, too much stress, etc.)?
It's usually both hard and necessary to integrate new habits into your life, but it's possible. Good habits are formed one day at a time, one commitment kept at a time, over a period of about six weeks to a year. When you do something for a long time, it moves from the really difficult to the almost automatic. As you develop the self-discipline, conditioning and stamina it takes to make a change in your life, you will move from the sheer willpower stage to the maintenance stage. The maintenance stage is where you are simply maintaining the good habits you've already integrated into your life. While it'll never be completely easy, it's much easier to maintain that 5am run than to start a new run when you've never really been consistent before.
So what does this say to you? If you have any good habits now, be sure to maintain them. Don't let them fall by the wayside! Continue calling your mom on a regular basis, buying low-fat yogurt instead of full-fat ice cream, buckling on your safety belt and paying your taxes on time. Enjoy the fruits of your labor and reap the benefits of having kept it together all these years.
As for those new habits you'll have to develop - you can do it, but it won't be easy. Start small, give those changes a chance to stick and move forward as you develop self-discipline in all new areas of your life.
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