How Adopting Positive Habits is an Easy Way to Transform Your Life
Reflections on one year sober
It has been a year since I quit drinking. I gave it up for a variety of reasons. Yes, there are still times when I think it might be nice to share a bottle of wine with my wife over dinner, but for the most part, I don’t miss it.
Like most of the good things in my life, embracing sobriety was a matter of forming a positive habit. During the first three months, I had to be mindful about changing my behavior. When you’re accustomed to settling down in front of the television at the end of the day, a beer can appear in your hand without you being consciously aware of how it got there.
We go through much of our lives on auto-pilot. Making a change requires you to live deliberately. For three months, it’s tough. Then it gets easy.
Now when I settle down to relax at the end of the day, I sip on a cup of ginger tea. The trick lies in reprogramming your auto-pilot so that positive choices become your default behavior. The funny thing is that three months seems like a long time when you’re trying to change, but in hindsight, it’s the blink of an eye.
As a parent, I feel it’s important to model accountability. As my kids enter their teen years, I know they’ll be faced with pressures and temptations. I feel a lot more confident that they’ll make the right choices if I make a point of showing them how that looks every day.
Maybe having kids was the motivation I needed.
Recuperating your youth
Every year I do a 50km ski race in the middle of a Wisconsin winter. It’s a brutal event held on hilly terrain, and every year it seems like a bigger challenge.
What I’ve come to discover about physical fitness is that maintaining a healthy body weight is the biggest single factor in your overall comfort level. When I was in my 20s, I competed at under 160 pounds. That provided me with an advantageous strength-to-weight ratio. Pull-ups used to be so easy that I didn’t consider them to be a workout.
In my senior year of college, I was about 5–10 pounds heavier and it was astounding how big of a difference that made. In cross-country skiing, the minute you struggle to climb hills, you’re no longer competitive.
I often laugh that during my twenties all I had to do to lose 5 pounds was to stop eating French fries for a week. It’s been decades since that was true. However, my experience as a young athlete underscored the massive impact of a very small change.
I’ll never be 20 years old again. That’s impossible.
I could be 160 pounds again if I really wanted to put in the work.
160 at 50 years old might not feel as good as 160 at 20, but I’ve gone from 240 to 220 and felt completely rejuvenated. I can’t help but wonder what it might be like to adopt maintaining a healthy weight as my next positive habit.
Abstaining for ski season
Cross-country skiing is a full body workout and I found that I could “sky myself strong” but I couldn’t “ski myself thin.” I’ve done my 50km ski race as heavy as 220 pounds, and I feel I put on too much muscle when I try to ski at that weight.
There’s a reason endurance athletes don’t look like The Rock. A muscle-bound guy would have a disadvantage against a competitive cross-country skier in a pull-up contest. All that muscle is heavy.
In my 30s and 40s, I found I could suffer through my weight handicap and get to the finish. At 50, maybe I’ve finally become mature enough to recognize it’s not worth the agony. Then again, maybe my decision-making improved because I quit drinking.
Anyway, over the last decade or so, I’ve always been dry through January and February as I went through my training season. The second the race was over, I was back to pizza and beer.
I don’t regret that life
I’ve had a lot of great days sitting around a campfire with my wife and kids while sipping on a beer. I think fondly on those moments. They don’t embarrass me.
Your body is different every decade. I had my fair share of nights in my 20s when I went out to the bars to dance and have a wonderful time. My wife laughs because she’d always claim every night was her birthday so she’d get a free pitcher of beer.
“It’s my birthday! Hooray!”
As the years pass, we start to slow down. When I first dated my wife, we’d get two bottles of wine, ham, cheese, and a bag of croissants. We’d go somewhere for the weekend and spend the whole day munching on snacks, drinking wine, watching movies, and doing other things. Zero regrets.
I remember grilling for the family and having my little girls run into the house to bring me a beer.
“Here you go, Daddy!”
“Thank you, Dear!”
And then, when they hit about 10, I began to ask them to bring me a soda instead. The idea of my girls bringing me an alcoholic beverage no longer sat well with me, so I gave it up. Things change, that’s the way life is.
“Daddy, put on your seat belt!”
There are times when I get in the car and forget to put on my seatbelt. When that happens, my girls scold me.
“Daddy, did you forget something?”
Some parents don’t appreciate it when their children tell them what to do, but I take the opposite approach.
“Thank you dear, you’re absolutely right, I’m sorry I forgot. Thanks for being my accountability buddy,” then I stop the car and put on my belt.
If I ride my bicycle with my girls, I always wear a helmet. Why would I expect my girls to wear a helmet if I don’t wear one? Why would I expect them to put on their seat belt if I don’t put on mine? Why would I expect them to turn down a beer from a classmate if they’ve been bringing their daddy a beer to drink for years?
Three months goes by in a flash
It takes about three months to establish a habit. We often set a year as a milestone, but that might be a mistake. A year seems like a long time, but once you get through the first three months, the rest is easy.
The best part about giving up drinking is the way all the traffic lights start to turn green. In my old routine, I’d put a pause on my drinking, lose 20 pounds, ski my race, feel great, and “celebrate” with a return to all the old habits that had made me feel miserable.
This year, I was still overweight when I came into the ski season. Like always, I lost my 20 pounds and finished the event. But this year, I feel compelled to ride the momentum of that achievement. I didn’t cross the finish line and break my diet with a pizza. I’m still eating well. I’m still losing weight.
Time goes by no matter what you do
As I write this, I’m 2 months into forming yet another healthy habit. The pounds are coming off. Maybe next year, I’ll be celebrating my 2 year anniversary of sobriety, and my 1 year anniversary of maintaining a healthy weight.
Good habits allow you to gain such momentum that it almost feels as if you can turn back time. Three months can seem like an eternity, and then one day you wake up and wonder where all the years have gone.
Don’t waste energy on regret. The good thing about time is that it passes without you having to do anything. When you start adopting positive habits, you might find yourself looking forward to the coming years.
