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As you might remember from my previous post that I had started sleeping on the floor. I got tired of sleeping on the bed, with a nice and expensive mattress, and constantly waking up in pain with a pulled muscle or cramps in the neck or shoulder area.

So, I’ve been sleeping on the floor for at least a month now and I absolutely love it!

I have a duvet on the floor as it tends to get really cold during night time and a few blankets on top.

Benefits of sleeping on the floor that I’ve noticed:

One day I thought of sleeping on the bed just to see how I would feel now. I had been working out, riding my bike to work etc so I thought perhaps it wasn’t just sleeping on the floor. Perhaps my body was just stronger over all from exercising and that’s why I never had a sore back or any aches upon waking up.

So, I slept on bed one night. Next morning my lower back was hurting and there was a cramp, severe pain, in my right shoulder blade!! It was just one night! That whole day I was in pain!

So, next day I was back to sleeping on the floor and the pain went away. Needless to say, I’ll be continuing to sleep on the floor for now!

Vibram five fingers are great alternative to barefoot walking. They’ve been around for a while now but I was resisting the urge to buy them.

A little background:

I’ve been questioning every single thing in my life, that seems to be set as norm or a necessity, these days. I have constant back pain, low energy, knees in pain, and now breathing problems. So, it was time to look at my lifestyle.

For example:

• I had spent over  a $1,000 for a decent mattress but my back is still hurting and I always wake up with a cramp, and feeling tired. Meanwhile, when I was in India, getting only a few hours sleep, I was sleeping on those thin mattresses, maybe 1″-2″ thick and I never had any back ache. So, do we really need to sleep on these thick mattresses?
• Hot showers! When I was a kid in India, I always bathed with cold water, even in winter. Winter there at that time was maybe 10-15 degrees celsius but still it was quite chilly. Here I can’t seem to take a shower unless the water is quite warm! Is it really beneficial and necessary for us to take hot showers?
• I constantly have high heat turned on in the winter time and high air conditioning in summer. Even if the weather is nice, I still have air conditioning on in my car. Could that be a reason for my breathing problems?
• Knees and lower back hurting all the time even though I have really nice and comfortable shoes! I do the research and I find the most comfortable shoes in my price range, with nice orthotics etc., still my knees and lower back are in constant pain. Do more expensive shoes really help? What if I just tried walking without shoes? Doesn’t hurt to try!

So, that’s where my fascination with Vibram five fingers come in!

For a more thorough review about Vibram five fingers and their benefits, check out this post by Tim Ferriss.

There are only a few stores here that sell them. I went to one of them, they said they had run out of stock and next stock was arriving next year!! Since, the company itself has a huge back log! Then I went to a different one and they had run out as well but apparently they were receiving some stock from a company that recently went bankrupt!

Anyhow, I eventually found another store that carried my size and colour. So, I ended up getting Vibram FiveFingers KSO yesterday evening.

I haven’t tried wearing them outside yet. Wearing black KSOs almost looks like I have gorilla feet! So, we’ll see…

Over the past few months I’d been trying to create new habits using different methods. Just to see which method would work and which method was the easiest to implement and continue with.

Write for my blog every single day

I started writing using Google documents. Every single day I would write for about 5-10 minutes towards a certain topic. After a few days I would spend the same amount of time to review what I had written and then post it on the blog. I would do it just before going to bed. Thus, going to bed was my trigger.

It worked beautifully until one day I decided to write on good and old paper instead of using my laptop, as my laptop was hooked to my television.

It was fine that day and I continued it for the next few days but eventually it died down. And before I realized it, already more than week had gone by without me writing anything.

Usually in the past I would have felt very bad that I couldn’t discipline myself and it would have kept reinforcing the belief that I was a failure.

This time, however, it was different. There was no reinforcing of any negative belief. There was no negative belief in fact! I was easily able to step back and analyze why I was not able to create that particular habit.

It came down to two things.

1. Convenience – When I would write using Google documents, on my laptop, it was easy for me to just copy and paste onto my blog. Meanwhile, when I had started writing on a piece of paper, it became quite cumbersome, or felt like it, to have to copy it again onto the blog. Also, when I started writing on a piece of paper it was easy for me to let my focus wander, writing about one thing today and totally different the next day.
2. Not having a strong enough reason for me to continue writing – I’ve found this to be quite a problem, as I mentioned previously. If I’m doing something for the sake of disciplining myself, it’s quite easy to fall out of it. On the other hand if there’s a strong enough reason for me to do something, I continue despite any obstacles.

Has anyone else found a better way to create habits? What are your experiences?

Just like trying to create a new habit, trying to break a bad habit can also be simplified into a few but very important steps. I’ve used these to break bad habits with great success as well.

1. Pick a habit that you want to break. In the beginning pick a simple habit.

2. Find out why you want to break that habit. Watch videos about the dangers of it, read blogs, talk to people who’ve broken that habit, and for extremely quick results, meet people who were hospitalized because of that habit, i.e. smoking.

3. Find out your trigger that causes you to act on that habit. E.g. whenever you’re in the presence of people who’re smoking, you have an urge to smoke. So, the trigger would be you being around smokers. Whenever you feel sad you start to eat, so the trigger would be your getting sad. As soon as you sit on your couch, you turn the tv on, so the trigger would be you sitting on the couch.

4. Keep your motivation up by exposing yourself to the dangers of this habit by either reading something, watching some videos, or hanging around people who are breaking the same habit or have already broken the same habit, every single day.

5. Whenever you hit a trigger that normally causes you to act on the habit you’re trying to break, do something different right away before you can act out of habit. As soon as you sit on your couch, whip out a book and start reading it, or just stop hanging around smokers, or whenever you get sad, right away start writing in a journal.

Trick is to have a strong enough reason to break that habit. Then monitoring your triggers. As soon as you hit your trigger and want to act on your old habit, immediately put a break there. Break that pattern! If you do that enough times, trigger will get weaker. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Don’t forget that by actually trying various ways you’ll learn much more than just reading about them. Just don’t give up!

A lot has been written about developing habits. Even I’ve written a lot about them but I’ve found the following 5 steps to be really effective when trying to establish a new habit. I’ve actually tested these steps many times and they’ve succeeded in establishing new habits every single time.

1. Pick a habit that you want to create

2. Break that habit down into small steps, 1st step being ridiculously small and easy

3. Write down why you want to create that habit, keep asking yourself why until you start to feel good every time you think about that habit

4. Read your “why” every single day at least one time, preferably once before going to bed and once right after you wake up

5. Perform the steps every single day and increasing in intensity every week. So, you would repeat the same easy step every single day for one week and next week you would increase the intensity slightly and keep it up for second week, and then increase again for third week and so on