How to Make Your Personal Yoga Practice a Habit You Don’t Want to Break
Make a habit of home yoga practice
Habits – or samskara in Sanskrit – are grooves we wear in our consciousness that descend into the unconscious, or automatic, parts of our activity. Like water over rock, eventually an action taken in a certain context will become automatic in this context. In neuroscience terms, this principle is stated as “Neurons that fire together wire together.” This simple fact can be our undoing or our tool, depending on how conscious we choose to make the association and how willing we are to choose new triggers.
The elements of habit include
Motivation
Ability
Trigger: an action you already take that you choose to always follow a little yoga with.
Repetition: every time the trigger happens, do the yoga.
Simplicity: keep the time, scope and expectation simple. A 15 minute Personal Yoga Practice (PYP) is usually just right for every day. You’ll be surprised what just 15 minutes of yoga on a regular basis can change.
We’ve covered Motivation and Ability, so we’ll look at trigger, repetition and simplicity.
Well chosen triggers and habits will slowly (perhaps), effortlessly and organically replace old triggers, making healthy living profoundly simpler. I’m sure you’ve heard the old saw, “Don’t think of a purple elephant! Ha, you’re thinking of a purple elephant!” Well, stopping a habit through simply trying not to do the thing you’ve always done is notably difficult in just the same way. However, choosing a habit and the right trigger can make beginning a new, countervailing habit deliciously easier.
Habits are defined by psychologists as “learned actions that are triggered automatically when we encounter the situation in which we’ve repeatedly done those actions.” (https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/bsh/2012/06/29/busting-the-21-days-habit-formation-myth/)
In the article, “Making health habitual: the psychology of ‘habit-formation’ and general practice,” published in the British Journal of General Practice, 2 professors put together the most recent research into how to best create healthy habits.
“…Select a new behaviour (for example, eat an apple) rather than give up an existing behaviour (do not eat fried snacks) because it is not possible to form a habit for not doing something. The automaticity of habit means that breaking existing habits requires different and altogether more effortful strategies than making new habits.
When the desired habit is Personal Yoga Practice (PYP), that means choosing the context that will trigger the habit. This is one element of why zoom yoga classes can be so great: it used to be that only going to the yoga studio would trigger this activity, because that’s how we did it. Now, when you can take a live yoga class in your own home, wherever you choose, you can actually make a bridge from class to PYP simply by yogaing in the same location.
But we can go several layers deeper. It’s often easier to keep an appointment you make with someone else than one you make with yourself. So let’s create a trigger to go to that location. A helpful trigger is often finishing your first cup of tea in the morning - at least it’s helpful for me. I get to enjoy that quiet special time, my favorite tea and journal and read a bit, then I take my second cup of tea into my yoga space and put on my Spotify yoga playlist.
This is a second habit hack: temptation bundling. I love listening to music and I will never miss my hot morning cuppa. These things are gonna happen. So deciding and repeating that they also happen in my yoga space nearly ensures that my yoga mat gets rolled out and actually used. Now, maybe your temptation is a fantasy audio novel, like the writer in the article linked above, or even a show. Choose what’s really going to tempt you to the mat. Is listening to Harry Potter or watching GoT the ideal match for your yoga practice? Probably not, but if it gets you there, you can choose to change the temptation later. We’re using the draw of the harmless guilty pleasure to wear a groove for the activity we know we enjoy and benefit from when we do it, but is sometimes hard to start.
Maybe your practice time is later in the day. Choose the trigger and temptation that are right for your time and practice and schedule. Leave yourself a note. Notes. Everywhere else you think you might go instead at that time. Repetition is the key. Make a choice to do this for a certain number of days (11 is great, more on that another time) and then reevaluate. You may have a habit by then!
Simplicity is the final piece to the puzzle: if you are trying to commit to an hour of PYP every morning after never having a PYP or exercising in the morning at all, things aren’t likely to go well. If you can find an early morning yoga class you can take via zoom, that’s a great bridge. But then, plan for a 15 minute personal yoga practice at first: Just enough time to feel your breath, synchronize your movement to a few breaths, enjoy the familiar shapes from yoga class with a tiny bit of experimentation mixed in. Or even 5 minutes to begin with. Keep it manageable, practical, not overwhelming, even fun. After a few weeks you might find it’s easier to expand than you once thought, if that’s what you want. And you absolutely don’t have to.
15 minutes of yoga practice most days a week is actually more powerful for muscles, fascia and your nervous system than an hour once a week. Put them together - a class or two a week and PYP most other days to explore, enjoy and deepen what you learn in class - and you will have an unstoppable force for healing changes in the rest of your life. Organic transformation unfolds in directions you might not have thought possible when you began. Just start where you are.
