Friday, April 22, 2016

Weekly Habit Experiments

I have been in Pune since September 2015 now and I got to know that here Gudi Padwa i.e. Hindi Calendar new year is a grand festival. It is celebrated with a lot of zeal. I thought I should take this opportunity to try something new and become a better person. 

Now, many of you must be thinking that this is something we all think of doing in every new year. Yes, that is true, I have always been making a list of habits I need develop, the achievements I want to see in the new year, the milestones I want to achieve, so on and so forth.

Well, yep the only problem was that the list of 2015 looked a lot like the list of 2014 and so on and hence I thought this is not going to work at all.
Hence, I thought this Hindi New Year can be an opportunity. I knew I can’t commit for an entire year so decided to try for something really short a duration and settled for one week.

So, here it is, my weekly experiments have started from 4th April. Now, I wanted to begin with something really small. I just randomly thought how it would be like to not speak any cuss words for a week and yep, that is what I decided for the first week. I had to follow this No Cuss Words rule till 10th April i.e. 7 full days. If you think it is easy you may go ahead and give it a try yourself.

Anyways, so how was my experience and how did it go? Well, for firsts, I think the week ended really quickly and I faltered for a total of 5 times. I realized that initially I indeed was, quite frequently saying cuss words in my mind but wasn’t just speaking them. But over a period of a few days I realized that I started using some other words to better explain, rather than the cuss words. I seriously recommend you to give it a try.

This was a good experience by the end of the week. I had two decisions to make now, first, what should be the next experiment and second, whether or not should I continue with the previous one. I decided to try no sugar+ green tea daily for the next week and also decided that since it was not difficult so I would just continue the previous experiment too.

So, for the next week i.e. 11th April to 17th April it had to be No Cuss Words + No Sugar + Daily Green Tea.

The week obviously has ended so you might be wondering as to how did it go. Well, No Cuss Words went really good, though I stopped keeping the count of the faults because I found doing that insignificant. No sugar regime has been strictly followed and quite easily actually but this Green Tea Daily has been difficult and I think I could only follow it for 3 days out of 7. I think the reason being that following this involved preparing green tea and I have been too lazy to do so.

Anyways, I have continued all three experiments for the subsequent week too and it has been going well. Though I had to add another habit and I wanted to try Daily Meditation but I have failed at that too.
Now, for the coming week I have decided not to add any habits and to carry all four of these habits to this week and see how that goes. If at all everything goes fine. I will start adding more habits, else I will drop some of these.


Current habits to pursue in the next week starting next Monday i.e. 25th April 2016 are No Cuss Words + No Sugar + Daily Green Tea + Daily Meditation. Hoping for the best!