As we approach the end of the Summer Whole Life Challenge, you may be thinking about how you’re going to maintain some of the new habits and behaviors that have started to become a part of your daily life.
The Challenge is a particular time when being focused and specific about each habit pays off — by enforcing a kind of rhythm, you can build habits that become natural. The question you may have is about transitioning from the daily act of tracking and “compliance” to just “being” in the habit as it now exists in your life.
Take water, for example. After weeks of counting ounces, moving rubber bands up and down a bottle, entering amounts into a tracking app, can you continue to drink enough without feeling like you still need to measure every drop?
The short answer is yes, and in the video above, I share with you an approach that turns you into a water drinker — someone who gets what they need without having to drill down to ounces or milliliters every time they take a sip.
It’s a great way to continue to stay hydrated without having to be a water bureaucrat forever.
Rather than ticking off how many ounces I’ve had in a day or physically counting bottles of water, I rely on my perception of when I have, over time, created pockets of habitual water drinking, and I formalize those.
For example, I always drink 16 oz. of water as soon as I get up in the morning at 6am. If I can have one more glass before 9am (when work starts), I’m one-third of the way through my goal. If I just do this, I don’t have to count ounces. I just know that by 9am every day, I drink a liter of water.
By creating two more routines like this in the afternoon and the evening, I just know that my 3 liters are covered without having to wonder about it at all.
See, a habit means that the practice is habitual, not random.
If I’m just grabbing a cup of water here and a can of seltzer there, I can’t know where I am without doing math. Rather than doing that, I have become a “water drinker” by virtue of consciously practicing and tracking the habit until something that represents the result I want emerges on its own.
That means that I can trust that what I’m doing during the day satisfies my commitment without having to think about it. It’s a level of mastery that is valuable in every habit at some point.
So more than just a strategy for water, in this video you can discover how this is really a strategy for fully integrating any habit you’ve created into the normal rhythm of your daily life. (Tune it at the 4:40 mark if this is what you’re looking for!)
This is a really important step in habit creation — letting go of the need to track, and trusting that the work you’ve done has made you into a person who just is this way. Leaving the “building phase” and living in the “result phase.”
So check the video out and learn how to easily know you’ve met your daily goal and how to take the steps toward fully integrating your habits into your daily life.
He graduated from UCLA with a BA in philosophy as well as a degree from the Southern California School of Culinary Arts, and feels food is one of the most important parts of a life - it can nourish, heal, and bring people together.
Michael believes health and well-being are as much a state of mind as they are a state of the body, and when it comes to fitness, food, and life in general, he thinks slow is much better than fast (most of the time). Stopping regularly to examine things is the surest way to put down roots and grow.
He knows he will never be done with his own work, and believes the best thing you can do for your well-being starts with loving and working from what you’ve got right now.
