I’ve been asked by clients and friends  about how to leverage this time of social isolation to make sustainable lifestyle changes and how to form healthier habits. 

And it’s interesting to me that, faced with a global health crisis so few of us have ever lived through before,  so many of us would have this instinct to keep being productive, to keep getting better. It’s admirable, but it also might be a symptom of our hyper-focused, high-expectationed daily mindsets, as they attempt to assert themselves in this void of routine and purpose. 

I say this because, usually, we tend to think about habits as additions to our lives--  augmentations to our days and to our measure as worthy, healthy, productive human beings. And now, in this time of uncertainty, we ostensibly have the time to pack in as much “self-care” optimization as we can.

But I’d like to gently push back on this pressure to be productive. 

To establish why, let’s go over why it is so hard to install these shiny new habits in “normal” life. It’s our old habits.

Our habits become habits because they give us some sort of reward: they trigger dopamine, they make us feel safe, they make us feel comfortable. Even when they make us feel bad, the brain is drawn towards the salve of familiarity nonetheless. This is how we adapt to deal with anxieties and stresses that, on normal days, are also familiar, and thus a self reinforcing feedback loop is created. Familiar anxiety or trigger, familiar habit or coping strategy, familiar reward of familiarity, no change, familiar anxiety or trigger… and so on. The more automatically we can move through the cycle, the deeper the rut becomes, and the stronger the neurological circuitry for this loop. 

Now, these days, nothing is familiar. Our fears are new, they are heightened. Our ability to project accurately what is in store for ourselves and our knowledge of what to fall back on is shaken. Ideal time for brand new habits, right?

Yes- and no. 

If you’re thinking this way, you may be repeating an old habit loop already -the habit of pressuring ourselves to pile on new tasks, the reward in being able to project yourself into the near future as a better, more efficient, more accomplished person. The faltering, the self doubt, the re-commitment to more, bigger, and better.  But if piling on has ever worked, and the building up of overwhelm and promises of “doing better” tomorrow has ever allowed us to climb out of our familiar ruts, we wouldn’t be here, now, wanting a different way. 

How are you going to do better in a terrain you’re unfamiliar with? How are you going to react to new stimuli, new triggers, new threats, by doing more? In all reality, you’ll just end up doing more of the same- more pressure, more planning, more avoiding, more procrastination, more disappointment, more frantic efforts to feel familiarity in a darkened landscape. 

But let’s step off the path-- just a step-- and pause. 

I think now is the time to tenderly decouple ourselves from the grasp of our old habits, including the habitual cycle of attempting to suffocate out our current anxieties with new activity. 

We don’t need more. We don’t need to do more or be more. Perhaps all we need is just to let go. 

With everything that’s been tried up to now, how many of us can honestly say that we’ve cultivated a habit of letting go? 

The habit of appraising your discomfort with yourself, your body, your daily routine, and instead of asking yourself what you can add, what exercise routine you can hammer, how early you can get up, what nootropics you can consume, what planners you can buy… no. let’s ask what thought patterns and tensions you can do without.

Let’s use this opportunity this shitty plague has given us. Let’s lean into the stripping away of our daily routines, our identities as productive working folks, and our habituated mental ruts, and instead find out what else we can let go of. I promise that this type of awareness tends to lead to healthy self-nourishing activities in a round about way, but that’s not really the point. 

Here’s some pointers for a new habit of letting go: 

1. Stop. Realize you’re guarding, you’re pushing back against your own anxiety, against someone else, against feelings of impending doom. Maybe you’re hiding from these feelings, denying them. Accept it, it’s happening. 

2. Find the tension in your body. Is it in your stomach, your throat, your head, your shoulders? I used to hold it all in the curl of my toes, super hidden away. 

3. Relax your tension. Experiment with breathing into it, then breathing it out and away. How does it feel to let it go? 

4. Notice what arises in your relaxation. These thoughts? Fears? Anxieties? Insecurities? They’re not a part of you or your fucking body, they’re released. 

5. Appraise your surroundings. Extend out your hearing, use the full range of motion of your eyeballs, move slowly. There’s beauty here you can take in. There’s familiarity to soothe yourself with. There’s an environment that you built, or that you chose to be in. You have both grounding and a sense of control, you don’t need to keep clinging. 

6. Now ask yourself, what would feel good? To keep this beauty? To nourish? Don’t ask what you would usually do at this point in your day or in response to certain stimulus, but instead probe into what would make you feel fresh and at peace in your surroundings? A cup of water with lime? A good sweat? A dose of music? A shower? Answering that one email? Try it out, yes! 

Here’s to stopping yourself at least once a day and running through this. Yes, exercise is super important, as is sleep, as is nutrition, but if nothing comes out of quarantine but a habit of letting go, then there you are, that is something new.