What are good habits to do!!

Mindfulness meditation - becoming aware of your thoughts and urges and realising that you don't have to act on them.

 

Kind of obvious, but keep good notes on a calendar and track everything. Provides awareness, perspective and incentive.

 

Make your bed upon rising each morning.

 

It's a conscious act at first, giving you a small sense of completion. You kind of keep going from there.

 

Have a system and continue to do "system updates." Having a bag full of tips is not a system, especially if you don't do those things consistently. Even doing certain things regularly is not a system, how does one thing you do connect to another?

I'm afraid habits = mindlessly doing something in the minds of many, even good ones just because at some point someone said this is a good habit so you give it a go whether you see how it is beneficial or not. And having a list of benefits is NOT the same as seeing it work in your own experience.

We're all reading this on some computer, a computer doesn't have "good habits" - it has exact and definite functions. Nobody would use a computer if it just has pretty consistent "habits" that are generally considered good, it has to have a working system. The reason good things like exercise and eating right feels good is because there's already a working system and those inputs work with that system, almost completely ignoring that and just going with what our general ideas are doesn't involve any understanding. There's a difference between exercising to generally feel good or be stronger and exercising for a specific sport, or healing a specific injury. The first example is largely based on ignorance, the second is based on specific outcome desired and specific knowledge of how the body works.

 

Ongoingsupport, in the vein of concision, I'll summarize:

Practice the beneficial, consciously

 

Actually that's probably what
keeps people from understanding things systematically. There's probably just a list and the simplistic thinking just puts it in the beneficial category, which doesn't involve any functional understanding. I'm afraid the word conscious gets thrown around too much so as to be next to meaningless. You can be conscious of something as beneficial, but how exactly it is beneficial is a very different understanding. Most categorizing under the big umbrella of beneficial is very simplistic short sighted thinking.

 

Journaling your thoughts and emotions, the good moments and the bad experiences throughout the past day, and your plans for this new day about how you will improve and move towards your goals.

 

Understanding the cause and effect, not just generally like "meditation does this and that for my brain" but in the moment - that's what mindfulness is about. That leads to the understanding of how things work, which allows you to build a system that works with natural, existing systems.

In 12 Step they do a moral inventory, in Buddhist, or say karmically focused inventory it's functional. Moral is black and white, functional is this causes that, this leads to that. Morality can be largely preconceived notions where you apply a given filter of judgement, karmic cause and effect is just what actually happens.

So I say take the functional inventory a step further, to live with knowledge of how nature works, specifically our nature personally though more generally with PMO and rebooting. And some of it is just down right practical, like if you work certain hours and how you get to work then you work with those factors in how you can do things to support your recovery. It's not just always a question of when you have time btw, like I decided to be a bike commuter so I get a good amount of low impact exercise as a lifestyle factor rather than having a set time to devote to exercise - it's integrated and it has multiple purposes for both transportation and fitness, to give a common practical example.

 

Every time I brush my teeth, lift a set of weights, take vitamins, take medicines / substances, walk for an hour, get 20 mins of sunshine, or at least natural light outside, appointments and times, reminders to pay rent and bills, when public holidays are. Also every successful day of no PMO, every wet dream, every relapse. That's just my calendar.

I also go into detail in a digital journal every morning, for recording dreams and then an overview of my previous day. Being able to see progress and relapse patterns at a glance is a good thing, keeping the journal as well is how to be most effective. If I start a new vitamin, cut out youtubes or start getting more sunshine, I can then compare changes in how I look and feel to what new habits I have started and what old ones I have discarded.

Tracking wet dreams helped me notice a pattern of relapse in M O the next night. So it helps to identify triggers, and to keep momentum going because you can visually see your progress.

 

No, I'm saying inventory is a first step, and there's a difference between seeing it as a big list of right and wrong, good and bad and seeing it in terms of how it all works together.

If you're taking apart a machine, you don't have two sides like these are good parts and those are bad parts, that would be ridiculous. They all do their job in the scheme of things, it's a matter of at least getting some idea of what they do.

 

Strictly speaking it isn't a habit, because a habit is sort of unconscious repetition. Knowing what something does is to have a deeper understanding of it so you can see how it can be used.

If we take fasting as an example, that is fairly simple on the surface - but how long do you do it for? That's actually the wrong question if someone is trying to answer it with "X days" or whatever, it depends on what your body is doing in response to it. Also depending on what's going on you may not want to totally fast but do a cleanse with juices or something, or put off the fast if you're recovering from a broken bone or something where you need to build up instead. It all has to do with timing instead of an aribitrary decision in isolation, everything has some impact directly or indirectly.