Thought I’d write something a bit different this week, especially in light of me not writing a post last week.

Sometimes, habits have to be broken because life gets in the way.

These past two weeks I’ve had long, fairly stressful, work days as well as a very complicated house move due to factors outside my control.

With the amount of time that I had available to myself severely diminished, I found it very difficult to fit in everything I wanted to. In addition, during that free time I did have I was pretty exhausted.

A lot of the time, these situations can be avoided by some good forward-planning. It’s easier to say then do, however, but we’ve got to make sure that we aren’t letting things slip that we know are going to come back and bite us later down the line. It’s not worth the stress that will be inflicted on us.

When there is no other choice though, we’ve got to work out what habits we need to keep, and those we need to drop.

The first type of habits that we should try to keep are personal care ones. These are the things that feel like rewards, either during or after. Classic examples are the simple things like brushing your teeth and showering, or slightly bigger things like exercise or reading. The reason we want to keep those are that we want to make sure we’re not burning ourselves out by everything else going on in our life. Especially if it’s a period that’s going to last a few weeks.

The next type of habits to keep are those which are moving you in the direction you want to go in. Whether it’s practicing your singing or job applications, it’s important that you keep going with these so that you don’t get bitter about your current situation for restricting your forward progress.

That’s probably all you will be able to do. You might even have to curtail some of the above so you’re not able to do it as regularly as you would normally (my case being a perfect example: down from 1 post every week to 1 every two weeks).

The key with this is reminding yourself what you need to pick up and when. The latter might be quite tricky to definitively know – e.g. next Sunday. But as long as you’ve made a note of your habits that you need to pick back up, the next time you found yourself with more spare time than normal you’ll remember to start again.

As always, it’s difficult to get going again, especially on any habits that you paused entirely. At this point, remind yourself why you’re doing it in the first place, couple it with some benefit if needs by, and get cracking. Nothing good in life ever came easy.