Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Year-End Supercut


Image result for animated calendar gifWow! Happy New Year! I can't believe it's the end of my 2019 Take It or Leave It Challenge--let alone the end of a decade. Don't get me started on how time flies. 2020? Really?

For the last week of the challenge, I tried putting the pieces together for a supercut of this year's Take Its. Bullet journaling and planking, remember those? And balancing on one foot, reading fairy tales, dry brushing, and drinking all that water? Yeah, I barely remember them, too. Though I tried to keep up, I found myself getting farther behind the Take It 8-ball as the weeks progressed. (And I wasn't so great with all the Leave Its, either.)

Which brings me to the two big lessons I learned this year: 1) even small changes can have big effects, and 2) I need more than one week to turn those small changes into habits. There is a common claim in popular culture that it takes 21 days for a behavior to become habit, but the research doesn't back it up. For instance, a study in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that it can take anywhere from 18-254 days for a person to form a new habit, with the average being 66 days. Some habits are easier to make/break than others, and some people are just better at it.

This week was a good reminder of all the little life tweaks I enjoyed discovering this year. But with the craziness of the Christmas holiday, it was also pretty much the worst week to try pull it all together. So in the interest of giving myself a fair shot, I decided to extend my supercut for one week. It seems only fitting, as January is prime time for goals and resolutions and all that good stuff.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by this year! I hope you'll continue to visit in 2020. And I wish you a great start to a year--no, a decade--full of health, happiness, and prosperity!



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