03 Mar 2013
Belle
2 minutes really can make a difference
Leo Babauta wrote a post recently on Zen Habits about—unsurprisingly— building habits. One of his four points really stood out to me, even though I’ve heard it time and time again.
Actually doing the habit is much more important than how much you do.
Leo’s advice is to “start exceedingly small.” He talks about just flossing one tooth, or just exercising for 1-2 minutes per day. 1-2 minutes! That’s barely anything! The cool thing about this is that if you believe his quote above, it doesn’t matter how long you spend on the habit—it only matters that you do it.
If you can do two weeks of 1-2 minutes of exercise, you have a strong foundation for a habit. Add another week or two, and the habit is almost ingrained. Once the habit is strong, you can add a few minutes here and there. Soon you’ll be doing 30 minutes on a regular basis — but you started out really small.
I’ve always liked the idea of the first step approach to building habits (probably something I also got from Leo, but call me out if you know who pioneered this idea). The idea being that you get up and put your running shoes on or you pour a glass of water or you set the timer for your meditation. If you don’t go any further than that first step, it’s ok. You count it as a win anyway. Chances are, though, once you’ve started the habit you’ll more than likely follow through.
Somehow the first step approach wasn’t enough to motivate me. I knew in theory it would work, but I also knew that the end-game was to actually run or drink the water or meditate for an hour. I still had a mental block stopping me from getting started.
For whatever reason, Leo’s next paragraph hit me at exactly the right time.
One glass of water a day. One extra vegetable. Three pushups. One sentence of writing a day. Two minutes of meditation. This is how you start a habit that lasts.
“All you have to do is two minutes” was exactly what I needed to hear. Setting a timer but not actually meditating didn’t feel like a win. But meditating for just two minutes? That I could do and it felt like an achievement.
So with this in mind I set about starting a new habit that I’d been thinking about for months. Here’s a couple of screenshots of my meditation habit in Lift:
I’m not getting it done every day—I often skip out on weekends when I sleep in. This might mean I need to adjust the reminder for weekends or move the timing of my habit entirely. But the exciting thing about looking at these graphs is that there are days when I meditated. I’ve started to build the habit, even if it’s not solid yet.
If you only had to do two minutes of something, what habit would you start? Come tell us on Twitter or Facebook.
- Belle