Habits are a good news/bad news kind of thing. Obviously, we want to have good habits like eating food that is good for us and moving our bodies enough to feel healthy. It is awfully nice to get into the groove of a habit and get workouts in automatically. What’s not to like?
Well, sometimes when we have a strong habit, we get thrown when life doesn’t go as planned. We are so used to doing things the way we always do that when family comes to visit or we go on vacation or we don’t get up at the usual time we don’t know how to adapt. It’s like we only know one way to do things and we’ve broken ourselves by getting off the track.
So then we have to figure out how to get stuff done anyway. In the moment, mostly we need to take a deep breath, remember that we are smart and flexible humans, and get on with it. In the longer term, we need to practice. That means that every once in a while we need to shake up the routine on purpose to remind ourselves that there is more than one way to achieve our goals or check off those tasks. Maybe once a week or so we try an evening workout if we are normally morning people, or vice versa. Maybe we switch up the order of our workouts. Change is inevitable, so learning adaptability is a useful tool to pair with our habit tool.
Go play.