Habits? That's a tough one. They are hard to form, they are hard to get rid of, they can help you become productive, they can help you procrastinate. They are indeed like casting a vote. My journey with habits has had a quite a history.
Back in 2021, post the covid lockdown, I had gained a lot of weight. It had led to a terrible hit to confidence and stacked up on my already long list of insecurities. During my college years I had joined gym with friends and got into a much leaner shape but covid had made me lazy and my life sedentary. Clearly something had to change.
That's when I started to go to my home's terrace for 15 minutes and do some physical exercises. First I started with some basic stretches with random fitness videos on Youtube. Then I found a really old unused skipping rope in the store room and I said, let's learn to skip. A couple of days of struggle with skipping but I actually figured it out. And that, that was the beginning of a new hobby. I watched countless videos to learn to skip with different stunts. I could jump once and rotate the rope twice, I could move around while skipping, I could reverse skip, it was magical and exhilarating.
But this was just a hobby, hobbies are spontaneous, habits are predictable. A hobby session is full of joy, a habit can be boring. So my interest in skipping started to die down as my physique started to limit what new things I could do. So the hobby of skipping slowly died down. But what about the habit of doing something physical? Did it stay?
Yes, it did. My next step was overcoming the anxiety of being ashamed to do exercise. As a chubby person, it can be awkward to do some exercises but I knew it had to go. That's the reason I used to go to terrace instead of a proper gym. I don't know what it took but I went to the first good gym I knew fooling myself that I would just take a trial and see how it goes. But once I went to the gym, I saw people in a much worse shape doing exercise and trying hard and I just went all in, I took a six months subscription and started from the next day. It was a huge win but more struggle was incoming.
Just voting for a leader ain't enough. Once your leader is elected, you need to demand accountability from them. You need to keep them on their toes. You need to keep a check. Even if it is hard, even it is unattractive, even if there is an easy way to solve your problems. Habits require the same effort. After a few weeks of motivation, the daily task of going to gym started to feel tall. I started to skip days, I started to cheat, I started to just quickly be done with it halfheartedly.
It took a great deal of effort to get myself to do it properly. But in the end I ended up continuing gym for 2 whole years. I finally left due to relocation to Bangalore. But the habit of exercising stayed. These days I just run 2 kms in the morning as a workout.
So did the habit of exercising paid off? Yes, absolutely, yes. People started perceiving me differently. I felt confident. I had elevated cholesterol which solved by itself, I feel much more energetic and with all the depressing news of the world, I think exercise keeps my brain healthy a lot.