We’re creatures of habit. There are so many things we do each day without even thinking about them.
Getting up and ready in the morning.
Heading out to work.
Answering emails.
Heading out to lunch.
Finishing our work.
Driving back home.
Spending time with family.
Winding down.
And all over again the next day. Until the weekend rolls around. And then, of course, it’s the weekend schedule.
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Doing anything consistently is hard, right?
And yet, how come we’re able to stick with the above schedule, with so little effort?
It’s time we give ourselves a bit more credit. No?
Well, the credit should actually go to your brain. And the way it’s wired.
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Our brains are hungry, pattern-learning machines. Our brains are also very stingy when it comes to investing energy in figuring new things out.
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So, the moment you keep doing the same things in a certain sequence for a few days, your brain is relieved. It can now “save” that new sequence to its i-don’t-need-to-think-about-this-anymore part of itself.
And wallah – you find yourself effortlessly cruising from one thing to the next.
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The best part? Our brains aren’t partial to any specific activity. Whatever you do in a certain sequence a few days in a row, it’ll greedily learn and make it an unconscious pattern for you.
So, I put this to the test. I’ve been wanting to restart my daily writing for some months now. But only recently was I able to make it happen.
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My morning schedule until last week was this:
Get up at 6 AM
Check messages.
Attend Yoga class at 6:30 AM.
And then move on to showering, morning ablutions, meditation, and breakfast.
Here’s what changed: I signed up for a 5 AM Pranayama class last week. It’s a 30min session.
I would have to wake up an hour earlier to attend the class.
But once the class was done at 5:30 AM, I now had an hour before my Yoga session at 6:30 AM.
No prizes for guessing what I slotted in for that hour.
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Here’s my new morning “sequence”:
Get up at 4:45
Attend Pranayama class at 5AM
>>Sit down to write at 5:40 AM
Attend Yoga class at 6:30 AM
And so on..
>>Sit down to write at 5:40 AM
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It’s only been 7 days now – but I’m already finding myself “automatically” opening my computer and sitting down to write a few min after my Pranayama sessions end.
Isn’t that amazing? That we can use brain hacks to achieve so easily, what we thought was otherwise hard?
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But what about writer’s block? How do I overcome that? And the fear that whatever I write is gonna be so bad, that no one will want to read it? And what if I just lose steam along the way, and quit again?
I’m confident that as long as my reliable brain keeps wanting to stick to its morning sequence, I’ll be able to write about those juicy topics without much delay :).