“Atomic Habits” by James Clear and the Self-Care Ritual of Routine: Or How I Plan to Process 2020
Months ago, Kylo and I met a little girl in the park holding an acorn, which may as well have been one of his training treats. He was convinced it was important. And as soon as she said hi to him and he noticed something in her hand, he blasted through all the tricks he knows in the sequence he’d been taught—sit, lay down, roll over. Over and over again as he followed her around the park. And all for an acorn he never even got.
Clear would call this cue, craving, response, reward. It’s a sequence all of us go through constantly as we interact with triggers throughout the day: I see my phone—cue. Wonder if anything new has been posted to reddit—craving. Pick up my phone, open the app—response. Lose several minutes scrolling while alleviating boredom and procrastinating tasks—reward.
I recently joined a pretty cool writing agency that has a book club and monthly trainings and nice people (hit me up if you’re looking for remote writing work and I’ll send you the deets), and the first book of the year was Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. I just finished it, and as I was reading about habit stacking—the trick of attaching a new habit to something you’re already doing—I thought about Kylo’s automated response to the hint of a treat.
It’s all automated, but when you become aware of your triggers and the sequence of actions they compel, you can start intervening, stacking on new habits and essentially harnessing the cue-craving-response-reward cycle to your benefit. This was one of my key takeaways.
My Next Big Change
In a few weeks, I’ll be closing out the chapter of my life in which I pick up and move every year by buying a home with LT, and I am effervescent with excitement. The nomadic lifestyle works for some, and for a time it worked for me, but if the last seven years were a day at Disneyland, I’m at that point after nightfall when all you want to do is chew a churro on a bench and god help anyone who tries to make you move another inch.
Reading this book was timely AF and my plan is to incorporate lessons from it into décor plans for the new place. For example, the living room ottoman is gonna open up to reveal all my home workout accoutrements. Kylo’s harness and leash will be on a hook by the door with my running belt and pepper spray and by god I’ll be running three miles a day again come spring. The memory of randomly broken hip bones can stay in the repressed pocket of mental space I’ll keep 2020, and 2021 will continue as the year I read Atomic Habits and reaffirmed how good it feels to have a routine.
Putting My Quest for Self-Improvement into Topical Perspective
What’s better than repression is processing and I’m only one of millions sharing the experience of this generation’s pandemic, insurrection, protests, disasters, loss, trauma, etc., an experience that is being felt in extreme and disparate degrees.
I think the sense that I’m not doing enough for others during this time is probably fair—I think it generally is for most people—but I’ll allow the feeling to be motivating rather than guilt-inducing. There’s wisdom after all in prioritizing your own oxygen mask before helping another with theirs, and if I can’t do as much good as I want to be doing right now, at least I’ll do no harm (e.g., doing my part not to spread illness; supporting causes, people, and local business where I can; and caring for my immediate circle).
I find a lot of comfort in routine, controlling the things I can control when so much of the outside world feels and is so broken. My emotional stamina is currently finite and fleeting, so I have to spend it wisely or risk losing hours, days, weeks to debilitating anxiety, which brings me again to the oxygen mask and the point of this post: self-care.
Clear’s book helped me realign my goals in anticipation of my next big life change and I wanted to begin by documenting what my life looks like now and what comes next in the hopes of maintaining my own motivation and encouraging others in their own goals. Accountability partnering is something Clear recommends, after all.
Pre- and Post-2020 Outlook
Fitness
Pre-2020: Oh, how it helped to live with a fitness guru two years ago. She had a home gym with all the trappings and helped me get into the best shape of my life. I also lucked out by seeing an incredible doctor who took Medi-Cal and helped me recognize that no ailment or discomfort was too minor to address. Not only did I deserve to be healthy, but I deserved her time and attention. Such a difference from how I’d felt on Medicaid back in Utah. Among other things, she set me up with a physical therapist who helped me run again without knee pain.
Post-2020: Though Kylo’s kept me ambulant, I’ve only just started jogging again and at a fraction of my former distance. I’m going to invest in more top-quality running shoes. I’m going to find a primary care doctor as passionate and empathetic as the one I met in California. I’m going to get physical therapy again for my knees and start increasing my running distance.
Mental Health
Pre-2020: I leaned hard on my friends and therapized myself by probably exhausting everyone around me emotionally. I started taking citalopram and additionally self-soothed with extreme isolation, alcohol, and constant, emotionally charged writing. God, it was actually great though—my output, and California.
Post-2020: I’m going to start offloading onto an actual therapist who’s paid to listen to me talk about me. I’ve done it before and it saved me, but I stopped when I couldn’t afford it anymore. Finding a good therapist is work, so I’ll document that journey too. I also want to start sewing again as a self-soothing and creative outlet.
Diet
Pre-2020: Okay, I ate and drank pretty much whatever, but I counted calories pretty regularly and worked out hard every day. For a while. After I broke my hip bone and moved from CA, I continued to eat and drink whatever but without the calorie counting and workouts. Commence losing all my previous progress and having the doctor tell me my cholesterol was too high.
Post-2020: I’m going to follow a diet plan to lower cholesterol and start tracking again. I’m going to wean myself off most meats. I’m going to start cooking again in my own kitchen!
Career
Pre-2020: My focus was completing my dad’s novel until its launch at the end of 2019. I spent most of 2020 doing odd freelancing jobs and completing the next draft of my own novel.
Post-2020: I’m actively canvassing opportunities for remote and local work as I prepare to set up a home office in the new place. I’m going to continue collecting freelancing work to reach my monthly income goal while also returning to a regular pace of posting to my blog. I’ll also continue the work of promoting The Music of Pedro and set new goals for revisions to my latest novel, submitting to literary agents, and finding a publisher.
Side note: Another reader’s group has chosen to read The Music of Pedro and my dad and I are attending their discussion this week. This is the second time we’ve been able to do this and exactly what I’d hoped for when preparing the reader’s group questions at the end of the book. Well, getting to attend the discussions was more than I’d hoped for.
What Now
LT introduced me to Todoist.com, a free productivity tracker, and it’s helped me consolidate and organize my goals in a really helpful way. Clear recommends harnessing technology wherever possible to facilitate good habits and sabotage bad. It’s now become my habit to add anything I want to do to my Todoist and then consult my list every morning to guide what I accomplish each day.
If there’s anything you’ve adopted that’s been helpful in your productivity, please share. And if you’ve also read Atomic Habits, let me know! Clear’s Habits Cheat Sheet is great, but figuring how to apply the tools in your own life and environment is an endeavor all its own. I’d love to know how other people are doing it.
Bonus poem about self-care and a pair of dinosaur print shorts I wrote during lockdown:
Uniform
A kid broke a needle into his finger,
and I learned how serious
it was to helm a sewing machine.
I mapped a pair of shorts
from bright red fabric—
dinosaur print
and confetti—
and now I wonder,
What was it?
Eighth grade?
That I wore for the first time
shorts without a tag
in the style of Wilma and Fred?
Shorts that would never fail
to fit my child-to-woman ass.
Would never fail to make the journey
thirteen times from move to move.
The only thing I’ve never lost.
Perhaps I’ll wear them in the
shroom suit that will
return my carcass
to the plane of fossil fuel
and potting soil.
After I wear them to bed
again and again.
A uniform stitched by my own child hands—
this is how I take care of myself.
Reb Cuevas, 2020
Reb
Reb recently discovered the convenience of eating Flavor Blasted Goldfish with chopsticks. Her essay "When the Ground Shakes," and poem "jicama" are featured in the anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild by Torrey House Press. Other work by Reb has been featured in UVU's Touchstones; the queer-lit journal peculiar, for which she is now a copy-editor; Tule Review, a publication of the Sacramento Poetry Center. She was one of 60 finalists in the international Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2016 competition for her poem "Dry Erase."
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