Want To Make ANYTHING Habitual FAST? Better Make It Fun!

The best way by far to make anything habitual is to make it fun! Think about it…if feeling good about whatever you want to change is the key to getting your brain and body on board for any new behavior, then what better way to feel good then to have some fun! Let’s learn some easy tips and tricks to make even the most mundane thing a rockin’ good time so you keep coming back to it until it’s a full blown habit!

In this episode we will learn:
~How to make meditation (yes! Meditation!) more fun
~How to make other behaviors more fun while you’re on the road to making them habitual
~FUN Visualization meditation

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Quotes: ”The only way I’m ever going to lift weights, is if it’s fun.” -Cheri Augustine Flake, LCSW

Interesting mentions: www.southerndharma.org

The Host for this podcast: Cheri Augustine Flake, LCSW The Stress Therapist and Author
Twitter: @stresstherapy
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A word from your host, Cheri Flake, LCSW: Feeling good after our Stress Therapy session? Awesome. Check out the show notes to connect with me, The Stress Therapist on social media or go to www.iLoveTherapy.com to find out about meditation retreats & yoga retreats.

Hey, beautiful people. What’s up? So if you want to make something habitual, I’ve told you thousands and thousands of times, you have to feel really good about it. And the best way to feel good about something is to make it super duper fun. So I’m going to show you today how to make even the most mundane behaviors a total blast so you get back to it. It’s season five, seasonal stress therapy. So relax, settlement in, and listen up, because your stress therapy session is about to begin right now. Hey, beautiful people. It’s time for some stress therapy, a podcast about how to meditate and get better at stress for people living in the real world. Finally, a place to park my 25 plus years of experience of working as a psychotherapist in the mental health field. And now, your host, me, the stress therapist, Cheri Flake. Hey, beautiful people. So we’ve been talking a lot about how to create new healthy habits, right? It’s that time of year. We’ve been talking about how to avoid the New Year’s Resolutionist mistake and actually change in 2023, how to not start at the goal as if January 1 is some magical day, which we now know that it is not, and to make your goals for the year, for the end of the year, by the end of 2023. I want to be doing this. I want to experience that.

[01:43] I want to be doing this regularly, whatever it is.

[01:46] And you know that if you know me, I am secretly hoping that the behavior that you’re working on to make habitual is meditation. Woohoo. That was a big woohoo from the Pink Treehouse studios in Atlanta, Georgia. So anyway, I want meditation to become habitual for you. I just came off a retreat, and it was amazing. We had the best group of people. Oh, my goodness. They were so delicious and wonderful and fun and sweet and awesome. And I’m filled to the top of Big juicy love. And we meditated all weekend long. We worked on meditation. We worked on different types of skills in meditation, different methods, and certainly we always touch on how to make meditation habitual. We even did a group hypnotherapy session for that exact goal because it doesn’t matter what the benefits are. It doesn’t matter how amazing it is or feels or how your life changes or whatever. It doesn’t matter if you’re not doing it. That is the bottom line. And there are a lot of posers out there. There are so many posers. Right?

[02:57] Okay.

[02:58] So I’m already going against the grain here for keeping it short and sweet like me, because that’s what we’re doing in season five. We’re keeping it short and sweet. So I’m just going to say that many years ago, I was on a.

[03:10] Buddhist retreat at Southern Dharma, which is in North Carolina. That’s Southerndarma.org. If you’d like to arrange to go to a silent retreat, it’s a beautiful, beautiful space.

[03:23] It’s amazing. The teachers are great. And there I met Venerable Panawati. I know I’ve mentioned her before. I’m a big, big fan.

[03:32] She is a monk there. And she said to me one day you will look to your meditation practice.

[03:43] You will look to the cushion as.

[03:46] If you are greeting an old friend. And I was like, wow, that will.

[03:55] Never happen for me. Because at the time meditation was something I checked off each day to make myself well. It was something that I just did with automation, taking a vitamin or doing yoga or lifting weights or whatever. I just did it because it was a thing that I had to do to make myself well. Just because it makes us well doesn’t necessarily make it fun. Open lifting weights close perin. I mean, I don’t think lifting weights is very fun. But even today I’m going to show you how lifting weights can be fun. And I did not believe her. And I got to tell you, as with everything else, she was right. I do look to Mike cushion as if I’m creating an old friend. It’s a beautiful space. I made it beautiful. It is really fun to sit there surrounded by things and trinkets and pictures and holy things that mean something to me. It’s my space. If it was my daughter’s space, it would look different. If it was your space, it would look different. If it was my neighbor’s space, it would look different. And it’s very personal to what I enjoy and what brings me comfort and joy sitting there. So there are pictures of people that I love. There are little reminders of things that remind me of times in my life. It’s my little shrine and altar to what brings me beautiful holy joy and that’s kind of fun. And I bring my sense of humor to the cushion. Man, I laugh while I’m there. I’m joking around. I write a little bit there. I have something to write with there. So when I go to the cushion, even though the thing I usually do first there is meditate, almost always it’s the first thing I do there afterwards. I spend a little time letting it sink in. I might write, I might play the harmonium or the guitar or whatever is sit laying around and it actually brings me to this place of solace and peace and joy and it’s fun and I want to go there. And I love the smell of this oil and I love this incense. And after I meditate and I’ve spent some time being quiet, I often have some really good ideas. So I have paper and pen there to jot it down. And lately here my daughter has been.

[06:16] Coming in as my alarm rather than my alarm, right?

[06:22] She’s been coming in on weekdays to bring me out of meditation and we just sort of hold each other and.

[06:28] Then I put her hair up and.

[06:30] We talk about what the day is going to be like. And it is fun because she’s fun. And bringing her into that space has helped. And always my dog is next to me and she brings her ball or she wants me to snuggle her. I mean, I make it an enjoyable space to be. Now how can you apply this to lifting weights? Well, when we’re meditating, we can’t really do something fun while we’re doing it right. That is what we’re doing. That is the whole nature of the behavior. So you want to make it fun before or after? Let me put it this way. The only way I’m going to be lifting weights is if it’s fun while I’m doing it right. So I also don’t really want to go lift weights. I still need a little bit of the motivation to get there because it’s not an everyday thing. And so it’s not a part of my everyday living. And I can’t have it stack it into other behaviors like I can with meditation. I kind of have to force myself to go do it right. So I only listen to mysteries while I lift weights because I’m kind of dying to find out what’s going to happen. And I have a little rule with myself that I can’t listen to that mystery until I’m with lifting weights again. See the trick there? So my brain, part of my brain thinks that mystery is real and is dying to know what happens. And the only way I get to find out is if I lift weights again. So I do also put on weights on my wrist and fold laundry so I can get to the mystery a little bit quicker because I might want to visit that every day and I don’t want to lift weights every day. Does that make sense? So figure out if you can do something fun while it’s going down. And if you can’t, then put really fun things surrounding the behavior. So I’m going to teach you a really fun meditation right now. I was reminded of this on retreat. We had it as one of our classes and we got a lot of really amazing feedback about this particular meditation. So this is what it is. It’s visual meditation, which I find to be incredibly fun. It’s kind of like watching a movie, even though our bodies are all closed up tight. And even if you close your eyes and you put on eye covers, which I highly recommend you wear eye covers for this meditation. There is still light, right? Light is still there. And occasionally when your eyes are closed and you look beyond your eyelids, you still see light. You might see a little spark here and there. You might see nothing. You might see blackness, you might see gray, but you might see a little spark here or something swirling about or whatever. And this meditation, the anchor is whatever is there for you to see behind your beautiful eyelids. You close your eyes, you put on your eye mask. You find a comfortable space and go for it. Okay, so let’s do it. Let’s do it right now. It’s going to be so funny.

[09:34] Find a beautiful space to relax sitting up. Allow your legs to find a space they don’t need to be crossed. You can be sitting on a chair, but just sitting up alert. Allow your limbs, your arms and legs to settle in, making micro adjustments here and there so you can sit comfortably for a few minutes. Allow your chin to be level with the ground. Take a long, slow, deep breath in your nose. Let it all go out of your mouth. Let’s do that again. A long, slow, deep breath in your nose and let it all go out of your mouth.

[10:28] Feel how your body is already changing.

[10:30] A little bit with each breath? One last long, slow, deep breath in your nose letting it all go out of your mouth. Settle into this space. Close your eyes and put eye covers on if you have them. Make sure you’re in a dark room and just allow your attention to come to the space behind your eyelids. And now just allow yourself to watch whatever there is there to see. It may just be darkness, it may be just little sparks of light here and there. Whether you’re in a void or a full on firework show, just allow yourself to be the witness to it. I’ll leave you with binaural beats just for a few minutes and then I will lead you out. Enjoy the show. Allow your attention to come away from whatever you’re looking at. Come away from your beautiful vision. Come to your breath before jumping up and ending the meditation and going on to the next thing. Just sit here for a moment.

[20:30] Taking.

[20:30] In and reviewing what this experience was like for you, what you might take from it. Was it fun? I hope so. Take a long, slow, deep breath in your nose. Let it all go out of your mouth and allow yourself to remember where you are and what day it is and what your room looks like without opening your eyes just yet. Take another long, slow, deep breath in your nose coming back to life. Let it all go out of your mouth. And one long, slow, deep breath in your nose, letting it all go. And when you’re ready, you can take your mask off and open your beautiful eyes. I so hope that was a cool experience for you. I have never done that class and had the class be bored or tell.

[21:48] Me that nothing happened. It is usually quite remarkable and sometimes it’s not. Just kind of depends. So maybe give it a couple of.

[21:58] Tries and see before you make a.

[22:00] Decision because I find this one to.

[22:02] Be kind of fun.

[22:03] Okay, so I think we only have one more episode for this season, seasonal Stress therapy. And the next season is going to be a little more lax. I did this podcast as an experiment for a year or so.

[22:18] It’s been more like a year and.

[22:20] A half, and I absolutely love doing it. I think it’s super fun. I love connecting with you, and I don’t know, I absolutely love doing it, but it is kind of a time thing, right? And there are other things that I want to try. So I’m just going to be around, I think, once every two weeks. And I’m going to take a break in February and get things together and start putting other projects in place because there are some songs that I want to write and some books that I want to write. And I’ll keep you posted on the podcast, but we probably won’t be meeting weekly starting in March. We’re going to be meeting every other week, so you can let me know what you think about that. But I hope that’s cool with you. I think it might be a little more meteor, right? Like, it might be a little more something, I don’t know, something to look forward to, something that’s fun. Maybe it’ll be more fun because I have more to say and less of a filter. I don’t know. Checking in once a week, it’s kind of a lot, right? But I do feel like you are meditating with me, which means a lot. Okay. On February 1, I’m going to be posting on my website, I Lovetherapy.com the Entire Year’s retreats. So you’re going to look at mountain retreats and beach retreats and little Wellness Day retreats at my office. It’s going to be awesome, and I’ll let you know all about those. And the registration opens on February 1. I would love, love, love, love, love, love to meditate with you for a whole long weekend. So certainly go there and see what offerings I have there. I’m so glad that we were together today.

[23:46] I hope it was a little bit of fun.

[23:48] Maybe have a lovely, lovely day. How y’all feeling after that stress therapy session? Good? Awesome. Check out the show notes to connect with me, the stress therapist on social media, at Distress Therapist on Instagram, and at Stresstherapy on Twitter. You can always go to Ilovetherapy.com to find out about meditation and yoga retreats and other offerings that I have there. If you live in Georgia and you’re ready to be one of my clients, go to my website to find out how you can sign up for a free face to face consultation with me. At the very least, jump on my mailers so you don’t stress or miss one thing. Until next time, have a lovely, lovely day.