{"id":5937,"date":"2017-09-06T11:56:54","date_gmt":"2017-09-06T17:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pastorbrad.blog\/?p=3101"},"modified":"2025-07-04T14:18:53","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T19:18:53","slug":"bipolar-creating-mini-habits-for-positive-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/freshhope.us\/es\/bipolar-creating-mini-habits-for-positive-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Bipolar & Creating Mini Habits For Positive Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
To change our default setting it must be done one mini habit at a time.<\/span><\/pre>\n<\/header>\n
\n
If you are like me, there have been numerous times you were highly motivated to make BIG changes<\/a> in your mental health journey. One of those times for me was deciding that I needed to exercise at least three times a week. That was a big change to make since I wasn\u2019t even exercising once<\/em> a week. So I exercised three times that first week, but by the next week I had given it up. I just couldn\u2019t do it. It was too big of a change.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve done this over and over throughout the years since being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1995. I would be highly motivated to make a healthy change regarding my sleep, eating, exercising, thinking, or working. It seemed that the motivation to make the change would last a short time before I would revert to my \u201cdefault settings.\u201d And each time I would feel like a bigger failure. I began to believe that my inability to stay motivated to make a healthy change had to be connected in some way to having bipolar disorder. After all, I could easily become \u201claser-beamed-focused\u201d on something I wanted or liked to do, so I became convinced that my repeated failures had to have something to do with having bipolar.<\/p>\n
It was as though any unhealthy \u201cdefault settings\u201d I had or any changes that I wasn\u2019t all\"yousef-al-nasser-261164\" that interested in \u2013 even though they would be good for me \u2013 could only be made little by little because I just didn\u2019t have enough self-motivation<\/a> to do them all at once. I figured I just didn\u2019t have the self-discipline necessary, or somehow there was a flaw in my character. Those beliefs changed recently when someone introduced me to a book that they had found very helpful in making changes in their life. The title of the book is Mini Habits<\/em> by Stephen Guise. I discovered that if I began making small changes for extended periods of time, the changes would stick.<\/p>\n
In the book, Guise clarifies the difference between motivation and self-will. He says that motivation is short-lived, and to make real change you have to begin doing small things that can be done via pure self-will, and not depend on motivation to do it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He started to change his health by doing one push-up daily. Sounds crazy, doesn\u2019t it? But think about it. Had he decided to do 50 per day, that would have required ongoing motivation, and he would have given up when the motivation to do the 50 push-ups had passed. (Which would have been on the first day for me! lol) So his first mini habit was to do a single push-up. Doing just the one push-up, he could make himself do it via self-will power. What he found was that once he would do one push-up, he always did a few more, but no matter what, he always did at least one. He changed his brain\u2019s default setting slowly, over time, and it stuck.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve got to tell you that this little book on mini habits is changing my life!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I\u2019ve stopped beating up on myself for not being able to make sweeping changes in my life. It makes total sense to me. There are small things I can choose to do whether I feel motivated to do them or not. For example, I know I need to drink more water, especially with the meds that I take<\/a>. But, the thought of drinking eight full glasses of water overwhelms me, and I end up drinking nothing. So, I started with the mini habit of drinking one large full glass of water with my meds first thing in the morning, and I\u2019ve found myself drinking more water throughout the day and enjoying it! I know, it\u2019s not an earth-shattering change, but earth-shattering changes won\u2019t work. Most of us do not have that kind of motivation with or without bipolar disorder.<\/p>\n
It only makes sense that our brains have default settings. Those are the settings that our brains default to when we are stressed<\/a> or things we can do with little to no thought. For example, my default setting for when to eat is when I\u2019m sad, happy, tired, stressed, or when I\u2019m awake! This eating default setting has been a well-worn patterned default in my brain for many years. Unfortunately, unlike being able to go into your computer default settings, make a change and click \u201csave,\u201d we cannot do that with our brains. Instead, if we want to make changes to our default settings, we must make them bit by bit, by starting a mini habit that we can do without one ounce of motivation on our part; a simple thing that can be done by sheer self-willpower.<\/p>\n
Discovering these things have become the single greatest key<\/a> to making change happen in my life.<\/p>\n
Your inability to not make sweeping health changes in your life is not a character flaw. It\u2019s called being human!<\/p>\n
So, what mini habit can you do by sheer self-willpower that will bring about a simple, healthy change in your life?<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It only makes sense that our brains have default settings. Those are the settings that our brains default to when we are stressed or things we can do with little to no thought. For example, my default setting for when to eat is when I\u2019m sad, happy, tired, stressed, or when I\u2019m awake! This eating default setting has been a well-worn patterned default in my brain for many years. Unfortunately, unlike being able to go into your computer default settings, make a change and click \u201csave,\u201d we cannot do that with our brains. Instead, if we want to make changes to our default settings, we must make them bit by bit, by starting a mini habit that we can do without one ounce of motivation on our part; a simple thing that can be done by sheer self-willpower.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hope-and-encouragement"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFresh Hope for Mental Health - Bipolar & Creating Mini Habits For Positive Change<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/freshhope.us\/es\/bipolar-creating-mini-habits-for-positive-change\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"es_MX\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bipolar & Creating Mini Habits For Positive Change\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It only makes sense that our brains have default settings. Those are the settings that our brains default to when we are stressed or things we can do with little to no thought. For example, my default setting for when to eat is when I\u2019m sad, happy, tired, stressed, or when I\u2019m awake! This eating default setting has been a well-worn patterned default in my brain for many years. Unfortunately, unlike being able to go into your computer default settings, make a change and click \u201csave,\u201d we cannot do that with our brains. 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