Habit Stacking on a Foundation of Breathing
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Welcome back to Recalibrating! In the last entry, I discussed the prioritization of basic needs to build a habit system to guide me towards self-actualization. This entry, we’ll continue focusing on basic needs and leveraging mindfulness to stabilize habits.
Overly Productive
One week into my “funemployment” I decided to take some time to look back and reflect on what I had accomplished and how I could improve next week. I actually still felt a bit burnt out; the opposite of my intentions. My system was not fully working. Something still needed to change.
I realized that, while I had laid out my best intentions to maintain my physical and mental health by prioritizing them in my habits, I ended up falling into the productivity trap. I felt a pressure to get my business started as quickly as possible. I have had many ideas over the last 5 years and I was so excited to get started on them that I wanted to start them all at once 🤦♂️
To manage my output and structure a prioritization hierarchy, I needed a proper system in place that balanced my productivity with my health. Goals lead to single, momentary changes of state, while systems lead to many changes of state over long periods of time (another great point from Atomic Habits).
To build this system, I went down a rabbit hole of research, looking for software to begin organizing my projects and crafting my second brain. I ended up deciding on Notion, in part because Notion now has AI integration (a game changer for automating systems and structuring writing). However, I realized that I was spending so much time “improving” my productivity system that I was forgetting the first rule I set for myself: focus on my physical and mental health.
To that end, I’ll explain more about Notion and the concept of second brains in another recalibrating entry. If you want to get started, I recommend reading the book “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte (I will be adding my notes on this book to my website soon).
Mindfulness
For now, let’s take a look at what knocked me out of the productivity loop I was stuck in: mindfulness. I went to the park and sat down (literally touching grass) and listened to a mindfulness session on deep rest. Instantly, I felt myself relaxing; finding balance and harmony between my mind and my body.
Instead of letting my thinking mind control my actions, I took a deep breath and began to let myself just be, without feeling the need to do. Our society subscribes to what is known as the “Efficiency Culture”, a drive to be productive 110% of the time. If we are not solving problems, we are not contributing enough to ourselves or to society. For more on this concept, I recommend the book Do Nothing, by Celeste Headlee.
Part of my reason for taking this recalibrating journey was to step out of the corporate life that perpetuates the efficiency culture, usually at the cost of mental and physical health. So, it was somewhat ironic that I found myself already falling back into the productivity trap, only one week in.
Reflecting on my week and the actions I had taken, I looked for successful moments of health prioritization. I identified a clear time each day that I was maintaining my desired habit system of mindfulness and mental health: every morning.
Each morning, I would:
- wake up and not check my phone
- Stretch and meditate while using the Waking Up app
- Journal about my meditation/thoughts of the day
- Write
James Clear in Atomic Habits would refer to this as a “habit stack”, a pairing of habits that enables synergistic habit maintenance. As outlined in the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, morning is the perfect way to start a habit system, especially when initiating the intention to do so the night before.
Habit Stack Analysis
Let’s take a deeper look at this habit stack to assess why it worked so much better than the rest of my system:
- By waking up and avoiding my phone (I moved it outside of the bedroom), I was able to maintain my attention on my internal state of being without being distracted by external information.
- A lack of distraction allowed me to prioritize taking time to stretch (physical health) and meditate (mental health).
- This dose of health cleared my mind, allowing me to focus on journaling to check in with myself and my thoughts from the meditation.
- Writing down my thoughts with a clear mind kickstarted an inspiration to begin writing (often for this newsletter).
In other words, beginning my day with a mindful action led to the deepening of habits related to my physical and mental health, while also providing inspiration to begin my writing workflow.
However, the rest of my day would often devolve into 6-7 hours researching and building my second brain system. These are tasks I enjoyed, but that I did not intend to prioritize over my health and physical exercise. The problem was not that I was being productive, but rather that I was continuously being productive without taking breaks. I was not thinking of what I should do next, but instead was reacting from moment to moment to maintain my efficient productivity.
To Mindful, or Not to Mindful
The difference between my morning and the rest of my day was clear: intention. Starting from the night before, I had set an intention to begin my day with mindfulness. That mindful approach led to a balance between health and productivity. In contrast, the rest of my day was spent in a reactive state of productivity, jumping from task to task without taking a pause to contemplate the health priorities I had set for myself.
I can feel the pressure building at the back of my mind when I don’t take the time to release it through health breaks. Too much efficiency, not enough release.
A few months ago, I listened to an interesting series on the Waking Up app (more on Waking Up here) called Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness by Seth Gillihan. Paraphrasing Seth, there is a binary state to being: we can either be mindful, or not mindful. Each moment we have an opportunity to assess if we are reacting to a situation or if we are acting with intention. One is thoughtless, the other thoughtful.
A key aspect to mindfulness, in my opinion, is non-judgementalness. When I recognize I have been in a non-mindful state and have woken up into (become aware of) a mindful state, I do not judge myself or feel guilty for having been in the “asleep” or reactive state. Instead, I move forward from that moment with intention, maintaining the mindfulness.
Every time I fail to be mindful I am presented with an opportunity to begin again. Each time I re-enter the mindful state, I am able to begin a new streak of moments that will lead to the betterment of my mental and physical health.
The best part of this mindset is that I will always fail. I know it is effectively impossible to be in a mindful state 100% of the time. That is not the goal. The goal is instead to establish a system that will allow me to check my mindfulness regularly throughout the day to keep myself on track with what is best for my mental and physical health.
Beginning With Breath
Personally, I find the best place to begin again is with the simplest action: breathing. Breathing is something that we do from the moment we are born to the moment we die. We take thousands of breaths a day (on average 22,000). Each breath is an opportunity to assess if I am operating in a reactive (productivity/thinking brain) state or an intentional (mindful) state.
Even better, breathing is something that I can do at any time, anywhere, to bring my body and mind into alignment. I can use breath to become aware of how I’m doing in that moment and if there is something I should be doing to prioritize my physical and mental health. Note that the purpose is not to pay attention to breath forever, but to use it as a recalibrating action to shift into a thoughtful and mindful headspace.
I have more information on the importance of breath on my mindfulness page and in my first collection “Begin, Again”. Begin, Again is a story about rediscovering my passion for astrophotography in Africa; a series of 3 timelapses that have been turned into breathing guides. Each breathing guide is timed at 5.5 seconds inhale and 5.5 seconds exhale, leading to 5.5 breaths per minute (more on this timing importance in Breath by James Nestor). The first piece is “awe”:
Owned by Synyster Gates, who ironically put me into a state of awe when he purchased it 🤯 More on that story here.
Triggering a Breath Assessment
So where does that leave me for next week? Whenever I am feeling that pressure build up from doing too many productive tasks in a row, from reacting from moment to moment, I can recalibrate by taking a deep breath instead of powering through. This deep breath can provide an opportunity to check in with myself and my current state of being, to see if I should take a mindful minute. Over time, this breathing response can be habitualized for when I am feeling stress or burnout.
Hopefully, this mindful assessment will help me to better recognize my other habits and assemble a system of habit stacks that will provide a healthy balance between my thinking mind and my body. Stay tuned ✨
P.S. I will continue to reference more and more books as I write this newsletter. I have a full recommended reading list here on my website. As I find the time, I will add my notes and thoughts as book summaries to provide more insight on why the books resonated with me. If you’re ever looking for a book recommendation, please reach out 🙂
