Habits - Anchors in Your Days That Calm the Chaos
Define Habit: (noun) a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.
As we look at our lives as homeschooling mothers, I do not think there’s a more accurate statement to sum up our desires as a mom. We want our homes and lives to be full of things that we value to be regular tendencies. Ones that are hard to give up.
Habit building in our lives is one of the most important things to tackle, that provides almost immediate relief from the feeling of constantly spinning your wheels and getting nowhere. Habits are like autopilot moments in our days where we get the most important things done without having to really think about them too much. Things become habit once we’ve taken them from the I want to do___ , to the I do _____ regularly. Of course, this doesn’t happen easily for some, and building a habit takes perseverance and continual effort until it’s become a solidified anchor point in your day or week. The key to developing a new habit is to keep striving toward it, until it sticks. To many throw in the towel before giving it the amount of time or effort needed to see the fruit of the effort. Having good habits in my life has allowed me to be a fully present homeschooling mother, while maintaining my work life, and keeping up my home. Habits take me through my day without the constant decision fatigue and feeling of needing to put out a fire around every corner. Habits preserve my mental headspace, and keep me healthy. They are critical to my life and I honestly can’t imagine how I would make through my days without these things in place. For the sake of sharing a few ideas, here are some of my daily and weekly habits.
My Weekly habits:
Sunday morning church attendance
Weekly meal plan and Friday grocery pick up
Designated family time, game night, outing, movie, etc.
Catching up with my husband, backyard date night, coffee shop outing, hot tub chat.
Some form of cleaning on the weekend depending on time constraints.
Writing out my entire week and every commitment I have in a paper planner for the week ahead, and glancing at it prior to that week.
My Daily Habits:
Making my bed
Taking my vitamins and supplements
1 load of laundry per day
Drinking enough water
Aiming for 10k steps
Get outside daily
Strength training
Going to bed with a clean kitchen at night
20 minutes of sitting after homeschooling for the day is complete
Prayer
Email cleanup daily
Checking my planner for what’s ahead each day, the night before
Taking time to tuck in each of kids at bed.
Yes, they are all teens and I still do this.
There are more I could add to each list, I’m sure. But you get the idea. These things keep me afloat when life gets busy and overwhelming. Throughout my kids' lives, I have also tried to impart good habits to them. From very young ages, we were building daily habits of cleaning up toys, brushing teeth, and praying at bedtime together. Now that my children are all above the ages of 13, we’ve added on to that foundation of good habits in their lives. They see how their parents live and are modeling some of their habits after us. (Let’s hope they just pick up on the good ones, and leave behind the bad habits we certainly have). The best way to teach our kids to have good habits in their lives is to have them in our own. We can’t preach what we don’t practice, and the older our kids become, the quicker they are to point that out. I’ve seen through the raising of my four children, just how different personalities respond to habit building. Some thrive and enjoy the consistency and predictability it brings to their days. While others are more resistant and require many MANY more reminders. I have a combo of both personalities in my home. The secret to teaching your kids to have good habits is the same as the secret to teaching yourself to have good habits.
Replace the bad with the good. Replace the time wasted with something you know you need to do more regularly and often. And when you miss a day, or feel the temptation to push it off to the side. Be firm with yourself, just as you would with your kids. The long-term pay off of a well-ordered home and life, far outweighs the temporary enjoyment of being lazy when you know you need to be doing something else. Chaos in the home and mind is never worth that temporary relief of not doing the thing. Procrastination always feels good in the immediate, but on the day you’re forced to deal with everything that’s not piled up, it isn’t so enjoyable. Good habits take time to build. It’s not about being perfect but about being diligent and growing ourselves in this area if we don’t naturally gravitate toward this.
“Consistency + effort + time = habit”
Let’s do the things.
This post was created based on an article I wrote for the Learning Well Journals.
