Several  people wrote to me last week about wanting to start new habits. So, I’ll offer a few more recommendations.

Hook your new habit onto something you already do. I meditate immediately after waking (well, after appreciating the delicious feeling of soft, warm bedding and a new day). I don’t get dressed first, because then I wind up putting away the dishes that dried overnight. I don’t even get out of bed, because that introduces a larger gap between what I was doing (sleeping) and what I want to do (meditate). I sit up in bed and grab my phone (for the meditation app) and my headphones. If it’s winter, I reach down to the foot of the bed to grab the wool throw to put around my shoulders, the throw that I put there last night. Minimize the gap between the thing you do regularly, automatically, and the new thing you want to do.

Make entering the new habit obvious. I have only one widget on my phone—the meditation app. I can’t miss it, and it makes it harder to go some place else instead.

Side benefit: if I missed my morning meditation and forgot that I had missed it, the app will show the day count sinking into the little bowl with big red letters: Save Your Streak!

Make your commitment small and your daily reward for doing it something that delights you. I don’t mark having done my shoulder exercises with a black ‘X’. I make a pink heart and outline it in black because drawing hearts makes me happy.

My smallest commitment to earn a heart is to do four airplanes (the exercise reminds me of the people who direct airplanes to their gates). I don’t make the heart small if that’s all I do or bigger if I do more. Four airplanes gets me a heart—anything more is gravy.

Chewing the Cud of Good

Thankful for my right arm reaching for something on a top shelf, pain free.