3 Quick Tips to Create Habits that Stick

In this episode of The Catapult Effect, host Katie Wrigley discusses proactive techniques for managing stress and anxiety, focusing on the importance of building habits around meditation and mindfulness. 

She emphasizes the impact of technology on our nervous systems and offers practical advice on how to incorporate meditation into daily routines. The episode highlights the significance of accountability and visual cues in habit formation, encouraging listeners to commit to small, manageable changes for long-term benefits.

Takeaways

• Building habits requires making it easier to do the desired action.
• Visual cues can help remind you to meditate or practice mindfulness.
• Accountability is key in maintaining new habits.
• Starting with small, manageable time frames is crucial for success.
• Consistency in practice can lead to significant life changes.

Resources
Website
Chat with Katie

Credit: Tom Giovingo, Intro & Outro, Random Voice Guy, Professional ‘Cat‘ Herder

Mixed & Managed: JohnRavenscraft.com

Disclaimer: Katie is not a medical professional and she is not qualified to diagnose any conditions. The advice and information she gives is based on her own experience and research. It does not take the place of medical advice. Always consult a medical professional first before you try anything new.

Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of The Catapult Effect. I am your host, Katie Wrigley. This month we have been talking about various different tips and tricks that are available to you through various breathing techniques, body hacks to help you lower yourself when you're feeling highly anxious or stressful. And today we're gonna talk about how you can make some of these things into a habit for you, these proactive things that you can do to help your nervous system be more calm and resourceful. So stay tuned, that's coming right up.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I know you have your choice of so many things that you can listen to on the internet. And I am so grateful that you're choosing to listen to my show and listening to something that can benefit not only your life, but the lives of those you love as well. So over the past couple of weeks, like we talked about in the intro, giving you various body hacks, Michelle Molitor kicked off this year with an awesome talk about Amy the amygdala, that is the fight or flight.

portion of your brain. Amy is who signals you when there is something to be scared of. And then we talked about different breathing techniques and body hacks that we can do to start to calm ourselves down. We shifted and started to talk about the importance of actually acknowledging the feelings and the emotions in your body as you're feeling them. And then we shifted into things you can proactively do to help you.

stay ahead of the stress and lower your overall stress response. And so what we're doing here with this proactive practices, part of that, one of the reasons and the big, think it may be the biggest reason, there's a few, but one of the biggest reasons that we have this big stress and anxiety epidemic right now are these screens. If you're watching this, you see me holding my phone and well, actually you're probably listening to me on one of these devices too.

Katie Wrigley (01:56.61)
They aren't inherently evil, but there's a lot of psychology around them. But the biggest thing is that we are getting so much input from these devices all the time, from the TV, from social media, from our friends, through the phone. We are constantly being barraged with information. And I may have this wrong, I believe that right now we get more information in a day than people used to get in an entire

year just a few hundred years ago. That is one of the reasons that our nervous system is spun up. We're getting all of this input coming at us and we don't get time to filter and process it before more and more and more is coming. So putting these proactive techniques in place is really going to help you be able to sort through and also make different decisions with what kind of inputs you're listening to in the first place.

So when we talk about building habits, we aren't going for broke right out of the gate. That is a great way to set yourself up for failure, convince yourself you can't do it, and get really frustrated. Who's been there? I know I have, and I don't think I'm alone in this. So the way that you build a habit is you actually make it harder to not do it than to do it. So what do I mean by that? So you want to make it easy to do the thing.

So if we're talking about and what we were talking about with this is meditating, taking supplements and using other different things that are available to you that you can do to help yourself feel calm, such as a Cognomovement Session. So I gave you four different things that you could start to do. So how do you make this so that it's harder to not do it than to do it? So if you have a place that you meditate.

One of the first things is you want to commit to doing it at the same time every day. It is much easier to get into a routine when you have the same steps you do day after day after day. So they say that one of the best times to meditate is right when you get up. Another great time to meditate before you're going to bed. You could do both if you want to be an overachiever. I'm not recommending that for a habit building though. What I want is this is new a habit for you. You're going to start with just a minimal amount of time.

Katie Wrigley (04:17.55)
but you're gonna make it really hard to override it. So if you have a meditative cushion or you have some other kind of setting, you are going to put that in a place that is very visible to you to remind you, there's my meditation cushion, it's time to meditate. Now in my case, I like to meditate in my recliner. This is part of my morning routine and it's become automatic for me and at this point, now I'm starting to stretch my meditation window for a couple of reasons.

One is it's time to level up. I'm always gonna be wanting to level up. either moving forward or we're moving backwards. The other reason is that I am starting heroic coach training next week and one of the requirements to be a heroic coach is 11 minutes of meditating every day. I've had many days when I've hit that but have I consistently been at 11 minutes? Nope. So that's where my habit is right now. So I've already got the daily down but now I wanna level that up.

So what can I do to do that? I've already got the routine established. So I have the habit in place. Now it's just adding to it. And that's easy. It's choosing a meditation. If I want to listen to a guided meditation, then I choose one that's 11 minutes instead of five minutes. It's pretty easy, right? So focus first on creating the habit. You only need to meditate for a minute for it to count. And we can actually do it together right now. We're gonna take

Four 15 second breaths together. We're gonna do a quick meditation. It may sound a little quiet if you're listening and not watching, but please, if you can, and you're in a safe space, and actually you should be in a safe space because we're just gonna be breathing, do this with me. So we're gonna inhale for a count of six, hold for two, and then exhale for seven. So I'm gonna do my best to do this with you, but I do wanna count so that you've got something to hold you in it, all right? And take a regular breath.

Let the exhale go out and now inhale two, three, four, five, six, hold two, exhale two, three, four, five, six, seven. Inhale two, three, four, five, six, hold two, exhale two, three, four, five, six, seven. Inhale two.

Katie Wrigley (06:42.072)
three, four, five, six, hold two, exhale two, three, four, five, six, seven, inhale two, three, four, five, six, hold two, exhale two, three, four, five, six, seven. Congratulations, you just knocked off your meditation habit for the day. So.

First thing I want you to do is look at when can you insert this into your day? Is it best to do it right out of the gate in the morning? Is this something you can do at your lunch hour? And keep in mind, the longer the day goes on, the more demands and the more inputs you're gonna have. And so the best chance for your success is probably the morning. You may have some resistance to getting up early. I get it, I used to as well. Give it a shot. And let's think about this. I'm only asking you to get up one minute earlier right now to meditate. One minute, that's it.

You could even open your eyes and go, man, Katie said I should meditate. Do your four 15 second breaths right there. Boom, you're done and you haven't even gotten out of bed yet and you already got a win for the day. So we wanna make it super easy. So we do this one by putting it right in front of us. So we see the visual cue and then we know, when I see this, this is what I do. It's also committing to that and deciding and being intentional with it that when I see my meditation cushion,

I am going to meditate. In my case, it is when I've grabbed my coffee and I am sitting down in my recliner, and at this point I've already been up for an hour if I've got my coffee in my hand, when I sit in my recliner, I do my affirmations, and then I go right into my meditation. Boom, boom. That is the order that I have been doing things for the last year, and that is what is my habit. When I shift that in the morning, I forget things, I get totally thrown off.

And so notice what happens if you change the order too. Not until you've created the habit. So make it so easy that it's harder to do it than not do it. And make yourself some visual cues. And then it is holding yourself accountable. What are some of the reasons that you want to meditate? What are some of the reasons that you want to be less stressed?

Katie Wrigley (09:02.998)
Less stress is going to give you a lot. It's going to help your relationships, your sleep, your physical health, your mental health. The unwanted negative stress, which is what we're getting from a lot of these inputs, this is the thing that is creating so many health problems. So many.

There are a lot of whys to start to meditate. It's also on top of calming your nervous system, it's gonna put you into a place where you're able to focus better and you're going to be able to make that pause when someone triggers you and it's gonna keep you from reacting and going into something that you may later regret saying or doing. No one here has done this, right? Yeah, I didn't think so. I've never had anything regretted either.

Being able to respond is huge and taking the time that is a skill to be cultivated. I'm not expecting you to have that level of self-control right out of the gate with meditation, but meditation teaches you how to just be, how to be in that lower state and there's so many other benefits. I encourage you to Google what transcendental meditation has done for a lot of monks who have been a big part of that practice for a long period of their life.

I know plenty of people that you would think are crazy crazy busy and they are meditating two hours a day minimum two hours and They're doing great and they are some of the most centered calm rational people you're ever going to come across that is a direct correlation to the meditation So they they have some other acronyms and I was hearing this actually recently on Mel Robbins podcast So the heroic app that you guys know, I love

And Mel Robbins, I'm huge fans of both. And both of them talk about these habit building and it's the same structure each time. It is a teeny tiny time window that you can't really excuse not to do it. And everybody can find one minute in a day. You're gonna anchor it in to a certain time of your day. You're going to give yourself visual cues that when you see that anchor,

Katie Wrigley (11:14.038)
that means it's time for me to meditate. And then you are gonna hold yourself accountable and you're gonna do it no matter how much you don't wanna do it. We're gonna go into a deeper dive later this year onto the difference between letting emotions rule your life and letting behavior rule your emotions. I didn't quite say that right, but it'll make more sense when we get to it later this year.

But learning to do things, even if we aren't feeling like it, this is one of the most resilient exercises or one of the best exercises that we can do to build resilience. All right, I'm going to keep this one short for you this week. And again, three pieces to the habit. One, anchor it into the day. What part of the day are you going to be doing this thing? Two, put some sort of visual cue in there. So when you see this,

You do that. And three, hold yourself accountable. Do it no matter what. You only have to do it for one minute. And the same thing applies if you're looking to do mini-cognitive movement sessions. Three to five minutes a day. That's it. That's all you have to do. And your body, your brain, your nervous system is going to benefit. If you are taking supplements, put them into a place

where you're not gonna forget to take them. Put them by your toothbrush, put them by your coffee pot, put them somewhere that you're going to remember, you're going to see them as part of your day and go, this is when I do this. Like I've got ashwagandha sitting right here, because that's my visual cue. I sit down on my desk, let me make sure I keep my nervous system nice and focused. That's my visual cue. Sit at my desk, take my ashwagandha, boom, hop into my workday. Anchor, visual cue.

holding myself accountable. Now do I take Ashwagandha every day? No, but I don't need to. Do I meditate every day? Yes. I'm actually trying to remember the last time I didn't. Do I do Cognomovement every day? Yes, actually I do. In some form or another. I haven't always been able to say that, but recently, yes, I do Cognomovement every day. This is benefiting in so many ways. And so what I want to encourage you to do, take these three steps.

Katie Wrigley (13:37.376)
anchor, put it into your environment, visual cue, holding yourself accountable. So what I want you to do with this, whatever the habit is, try it for 30 days before you stop. Just try it for 30 days and see what changes in those 30 days. What happens to your anxiety levels? What happens to your stress levels?

What are you noticing as far as your ability to be calm and pause? What are the impacts that this habit has given you? And just take it from there and decide what you're gonna do with it from that point on. All right, thank you for joining me so much. I am really, really excited about next week's episode. It is a first in the catapult effect. As you guys know, I really...

and big on confidentiality and most of my clients would rather remain anonymous which is why I use pseudonyms or you don't hear the names at all. But one of my clients actually said she was very willing to be interviewed and talk about her experience of what life was like before she found Cognomovement and before she found me to work with me one-on-one. And so that is coming up next week. You're going to hear directly from someone who's been doing Cognomovement for the last couple years.

and all of the things that it has changed in her life. And I'm going to give you a little hint. It is amazing how much has changed in this person's life. So join me again next week and until then, please be well.