Building Habits

“It takes three months to build a habit,” my dental hygienist informed me as she dropped three boxes of floss into a small bag and ushered me out of the surgery. “Just keep doing it.”

For someone who finds that periods of stagnation and routine often give me itchy feet, I have a funny relationship with habit. I don’t like all my days to look the same, I grow tired and antsy when weeks pass, seemingly indistinguishable from the last. Yet, gentle habits and small routines are vital to my everyday. They get me out of bed in the morning when I have nowhere to be (read, every morning of the past year). They give my days a semblance of structure that I crave, the desire to feel some sense of purpose.

Sometimes, however, my relationship with habit can be – for better or worse – quite strict. Almost obsessive. I’ve been that way since I was a child. Aged five, my dentist gently informed me that I had really better stop sucking my thumb or I was going to cause problems for my teeth. That night, I gallantly presented my mother with the two scraps of fabric that were once my treasured blankets, the steady enablers to my thumb-sucking habit. I never sucked my thumb again.

Resting thumb-sucking position.

Similarly, although I’d been told to floss before by a dentist, this time her words stuck with me. Perhaps, because I was now paying a hundred dollars a pop for an appointment. Perhaps, because I’d just finally decided to listen. Whatever the reason, I started flossing that night, and haven’t stopped since. Three months to build a habit? I can do it in a day – but only if I decide I’m going to.

Exercise has been something I’ve dipped in and out of. I loathed group sports of any kind at school. I would even go so far as to sit out of sports days at school. (Quite how I got away with that, to this day, I’m unsure). But as an adult, I’d found enjoyment in gentle forms of individual exercise. I tinkered with gym memberships as I moved from city to city, although rarely used it enough to justify the cost. 

By the start of last year, I’d more or less got into a routine, if not quite a habit. I’d go to the gym on Sunday mornings and, maybe, one evening after work, if I could drag myself that far. It felt like an odd kind of obligation, though, one I couldn’t quite give a reason for. Was I going for my physical well-being or just to be able to confidently say I’d broken a sweat at least once that week?

But when my workplace closed its doors, the first thing I thought to do was to start a proper exercise routine – and this time, I was very clear on why I needed that in my life. At the time it had very little to do with the physical aspect of it. It was an effort to move at least once a day, being used to a job where I was constantly on my feet. It was definitely not some bid to lose weight or contribute to the dangerous rhetoric surrounding “quarantine fifteen” or anything similar. 

It was a decision made almost entirely for its benefits to my mental well-being. The combined endorphin rush of a workout along with the dopamine kick of having accomplished something would set me up for the day at a time when my mental health was threatening to take a rather major dip. 

Day one of a two week workout challenge – chosen to last me the entire length of the lockdown (ha!). I collapsed to the floor, sweating and out of breath. There’s no way I’m getting through this.

To my own surprise, the next morning, I got up and did it again. And the next day. And the day after that. The habit-forming part of my brain had taken over, overriding my screaming muscles, and saying, yes, you are. 

My roommate at the time soon joined in and suddenly, we had some semblance of routine in a shaky time. We worked out five days of the seven, maybe throwing in some yoga on a rest day, if we felt like it. I became so used to the endorphin kick that I wasn’t even aware of it – except for on rest days, when both of us would stare at one another across the kitchen table, unmotivated and listless.

“Days without Chloe Ting are awful,” we agreed and eagerly anticipated the following morning.

As summer came in with full force, and I started to deal with the anxiety of attempting to travel to see my family, the endorphins were no longer enough to keep me settled. Daily meditation became a new habit – five or ten minutes a day of quiet, focused time. My routine continued.

I think anyone who’s known me a long time would say they were as surprised as I was when I became the kind of person to exercise five times a week.

Now, admittedly still in lockdown, I live alone, and my habits continue. I wake up, I meditate, I workout, I stretch. While this routine keeps me mentally stable, for the most part, I have started to appreciate the physicality of the work, too. I’m more aware of my body and its strengths and limitations. I am significantly less clumsy (recent incident with a sharp knife aside – that was idiocy, not clumsiness). I’m more flexible and physically stronger than I have ever been in my life.

And yet, this habit in my day, as ingrained into my life as my morning coffee or my evening tea, is still one I approach from a place of mental well-being. However much I comprehended what the dentist told me aged five, I knew it was a better thing for me. The habits I consciously formed throughout my life have kept me well, in mind and body.

That’s not to say that I don’t have bad habits. We all do. And the process of undoing bad habits seems far less clear to me than that of creating good ones. Maybe they balance each other out, to some extent. The flossing might help with my sweet tooth, at least.