The prospect of being hungry and ticked off and having caffeine withdrawal leads me to over-preparedness. This whole reset business has got me nervous that I’m going to be a bit antsy and edgy and I feel an irresistible compulsion to have Things To Do during those times.
Hence the ginseng tea, the baths, the walks and the journaling. Like I said before, none of these are necessarily bad things, but listing them out in neat little bullets makes me salivate with just the notion that I will have Things To Do to avoid the icky-ness associated with detoxing your body. I like order, I like tools and I’m just hippy enough that those tools associated with this project give me a little self-satisfaction for the halo effect I assume they’ll bring.
It’s doubtful I’ll become a better person, but maybe just less of a jerky one.
This has got me thinking about the habits I need to break, the things that if I’m pressed to consider them, make me want to punch someone in the solar plexus for even suggesting I examine why I have those habits in the first place.
(This person is usually my husband.)
In the search for more meaning for this process, I give you the Hard Habits to Break:
- Falling asleep watching Netflix on my iPad. Oh my God this is the worst of my habits and yet it is my favorite. When we remodeled our upstairs in 2010, and moved our bedroom upstairs, I was adamant that we not design the room to be TV-friendly. So you know what happened, right? Steve Jobs and his team invented the iPad, it, and the Netflix app, became a ubiquitous part of my postpartum days and now I rarely fall asleep without earbuds in and 30 Rock reruns playing. Considering I’m now waking up every night around 3 a.m. without fail, and there are so many professional warnings about sleep quality and electronic devices, there is no excuse for this. But just the THOUGHT of giving this up makes me ten times more nervous than giving up the three cups of coffee I have each day.
- Daily chocolate treats. I was never whatsoever a sweets person until I got pregnant with Abigail. I never had candy in the house or any sort of sweet. But then she started gestating and it sparked what is now a two-year love affair with dark chocolate and a daily – sometimes twice, three-times daily! – need to eat it. I’m not abdicating abolishing chocolate for good, but for God’s sake it’s time to get real about how much sugar I eat. I don’t have any choice but to not eat chocolate during the reset, of course, but I’m mindful that this is something I need to remove from my daily life.
- Eating everywhere but a table. Scott and I have a rule that we are awful at abiding by and that’s that at least three times a week we sit down at the dining room table and eat like civilized people. One of those is a weekend meal with Abigail since during the week she eats much earlier than we do. We want to teach this to our daughter for a number of reasons, and so far we’re batting a thousand. I know we’re not alone in this, but I also need to stop eating at my desk. Surely I can get up and eat in the cafeteria. My computer or TV does not need to become my dining companion.
- Weighing myself regularly. Blah blah blah body acceptance, I weigh myself. On a scale. It’s my choice, my business, my body, whatever. I don’t get hung up on the number as much as I use it as a checkpoint, but it’s in my bathroom and I checkpoint more than not, and it’s a slippery slope between using it as a way to see how my body is responding one week over the last and assigning the number more value than needed. I’m putting the damn thing away for the 21 days of the reset.
- Buying stuff. I’m going on a buying freeze. I make a budget, I rarely adhere to it. I’m not a shopper in the traditional sense – I sort of hate clothes shopping since I’m not particularly stylish or fashionable or understand any of it. I don’t like to give it much thought. Not that I don’t think it’s important or that I’m not vain, just that I know I don’t understand fashion, and when I’m exposed to too much of it it triggers a Keeping Up With the Joneses thing that makes me uncomfortable and itchy. Mostly I am your classic Sucker in Target sort of shopper. I’m also bad about using the Amazon app – and my Prime membership extras – on a regular basis for blender balls and books and sundry of nonsense. I want to remodel our bathrooms and buy a new dining room set and pay off what’s left on our credit cards. I probably could have done that by now had I not “needed” a new table runner or iPhone cover. I’d like to stop being such a CONSUMER, all-caps. I’m not mindful about this, despite being a saver. I have bigger goals and I need to start working toward reaching them.
They say it takes two weeks to break or start a habit. Hopefully trying this all out for 21 days will give me a better-than-the-average shot.
