Spring is right around the corner…I promise. Yes it’s true it snowed yesterday, but I swear the season will change, the weather will get warmer, the flowers will bloom and the sun will shine. For many of my readers this time of year means the commencement of a new school year or the start of new job. Lots of new things are happening. So why not use this momentum to start new healthier habits or refresh those we’ve ignored?
I love winter vacations—maybe a little too much. I get a lot lazier. I take the chairlift up mountains, and let gravity pull me back down. I gorge myself on sweets, meats and Cheezies reasoning that the winter weight is necessary to keep me warm. I stay huddled in 
my blankets a little longer on cold mornings and opt for doing my morning yoga routine in bed. But as soon as the long dark days lighten up and the thermometer stays above zero, guilt starts to creep into my ego every time I step out of the shower and look in the mirror. Laziness, however, is a heavy warm comforter whose inertia is hard to throw off. So as much as I love vacay, I’m relieved when real life calls me back into the office. Since I have to get up and get out anyways, I use this momentum to roll back into my old morning routines and try out healthy new ones (FYI: this is how I started my 1 year and 5 month long habit of daily cold showers).
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m terrible at consistency. I’m a roller coaster kind of guy. I like the excitement and spontaneity too much to keep the same pace of life. This is also how I typically train for sports. I like to peak during optimal seasons, and kind lay back during off-seasons. My approach is similar to the training cycle known as ‘periodization’ in competitive sports. It prevents burn out and plateaus. It’s also great for goal-oriented people with ADHD. So to keep or develop healthy habits, I use momentous events like seasonal changes or food poisoning to get the ball rolling again.
Capitalizing on momentum is common concept in the formation of habits. Search Google for ‘habits and momentum’ and you’ll find a bunch of posts on the subject like Forget Motivation: Change Your Habits with Momentum by Kendra L. Kinnison (a.k.a Coach Kendra). You’ll research will also lead you to Stanford professor, BJ Fogg’s TEDx Talk titledForget Big Change, Start with a Tiny Habit. Here, he maintains that behaviour can change due to changes in one’s environment (like winter to spring), and through the creation of small accumulating habits. He advises attaching these new habits to existing ones in order to maintain the change. In other words, by using the momentum from an existing action, his research has shown that people can push new habits to form (I encourage you to watch his complete TEDx Talk for a more comprehensive understanding of his concepts).
I find approaches that use momentum more tangible than motivation. Motivation to me is a feeling after watching a movie, listening to a podcast or comparing yourself to your gorgeous best friend. Momentum, however, is more physical. It’s something you are doing or something to which you are exposed. Reading about Adam Ondra free climbing the Dawn Wall motivated me to get back on multi-pitch climbs. A few weeks later that feeling dissipated after watching Max Parrot do an incomprehensible cab 1800 triple and a quad underflip (I still don’t understand what’s going on in that video), and suddenly, I was motivated to get into snowboarding shape.
But getting up for work, that is no feeling. That is necessity; that has to happen. So why not piggy back on that event and bike to work, then maybe next week you bike an extra few kilometres past your home since you’re already on the bike. After a few more weeks when your route becomes a piece of cake why not try to go faster. Then maybe get on Facebook and look for a group ride, and then, hey who knows, do the trans-Korean bike trails and bike the country. Momentum can take you further.
Spring is traditionally about new beginnings and fresh starts. If you’re looking to start something new or getting back to something great, let yourself get swept into the season. Embrace the change and you might end up changing forever.