For the first time since starting my new happiness journey, I need to try to build some habits. After visiting an occupational therapist yesterday I have some exercises that I need to do every day in order to improve my arm strength and heal it from an elbow injury.

How can we build good habits?

In order to ensure I do not forget to do my exercises, I set up reminders on my phone to do them every couple of hours. Hopefully, with time I won’t need the phone reminder anymore.

Building good habits isn’t just about our physical needs but also our mental needs. By building good habits we can slowly improve our quality of life and feel more accomplished. One of the good habits my husband and I have is walking a minimum of 8,000 steps a day equating to about 3.5 miles.

When we started walking at first it was a struggle and now it’s second nature, on days we can’t walk we can feel the difference, we feel stiff and in some cases sore. We have more energy on the days we walk and always feel accomplished when we hit that step goal.

There are so many good habits that I know I need to work on, drinking more water, eating healthier, and staying on top of household chores. These are things that will only serve to improve my life and in turn work on maintaining my happiness and cutting back on stress and anxiety.

What about bad habits?

For some folks, it may be quitting smoking or in the case of my husband many years ago it was cutting out soda drinking. I believe for me the habits I need to break revolve around not eating healthy and in some cases being lazy. For me, it’s so easy to put off putting away clothes or just rummaging through the pantry for something easy to eat for lunch instead of preparing something a little healthier.

Using a to-do list helps me to stay on top of tasks or even scheduling time to complete certain tasks. For water drinking, I try to always have a fresh cup of water next to me at all times.

If you have too many bad habits and feel a bit overwhelmed by them maybe tackle them one at a time, once you break one bad habit and build a good one then move on to the next one.

With time and patience all of us can become better versions of ourselves.