Replacement habits

I have a weakness for inspirational blogs and find new ones almost every day. Among those I check regularly are zen habits and tiny Buddha. The first one is the manifest of Leo Babauta, a U.S.American who changed his life from living unhealthy to living sustainably, healthy and mindfully, and he gained a great deal of wisdom on his way which he shares in his blog. tiny Buddha is a refreshing collective blog of many different amazing people who share their very own life wisdom.

From the zen habits I learnt the concept of replacement habits. Our daily lifes consist to a great part of our habits. Like brushing our teeth in the morning and evening. Like having breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Like going to work every day. Like having coffee in the mornings. And so on and so on. Our habits are the frame work of our days. However, sometimes we want to change our habits. Like quitting smoking or drinking or becoming a vegetarian or doing more sports. Or we just want to try something new because we want to get to know ourselves better. Often this is difficult for us and we fail at changing habits in the long run. However, Leo writes really nicely about two practices which make habit changes much easier. They are "baby steps" (starting small, aiming big) and "replacement habits" (the new habit takes the place of the old habit). I had some good experience with both of these concepts, and I just so strongly support them and like to share them.
So, recently I introduced a replacement habit into my life, and that was when I quit using facebook three weeks ago. I had grown tired of short superficial status reports, of bad-quality instagram pictures of food, and of hash tags which don't work and the present facebook hype (like you are not a whole human without a facebook account). So I deleted my account to escape my urge of checking facebook every day (a habit which was hard to change for me and it annoyed me) and to check how life without facebook feels in a facebook-ruled world.
So how is it? Actually, not bad at all, I got used to the facebook-free life pretty quickly. Not least because of my new replacement habits. Which are:
- writing this blog.
- following blogs of my friends and other inspirational blogs (full blog entries are often much more profound than short facebook status updates).
- being on ravelry (which is the "facebook for knitters" and I like it because it's a huge source of knitting inspiration and of many beautiful free knitting patterns).


This works so fine. I recommend replacement habits to everyone who wants to change a habit. It does not only make it easier, it is also an interesting way of getting to know yourself better.