A Year of Building Healthier Habits

On the first of January, Noor wrote eight resolutions in a fresh notebook. Exercise every day. Read a book a week. No phone in the evenings. Meditate. Cook every meal. Learn Spanish. Call family more. Sleep by ten.

By the twentieth of January, she had abandoned all of them.

She taught English at a secondary school, and term had started with a flood of marking, parents’ evenings, and a cold that went around the staff room twice. Every evening, she’d sit on the sofa to “just check something” on her phone, and look up at midnight. The notebook sat in a drawer.

#February: one habit

In February, Noor tried again, but differently. She chose one habit, the one that she suspected was undermining everything else: no phone for the first thirty minutes of the day.

Her phone moved to the hallway at night. In the mornings, she made tea, opened the curtains, and sat by the window for ten minutes before she got ready for work. Some days she read. Some days she just watched the street.

It was a tiny change. It was also the first habit she had kept for a whole month in years.

#March and April: building slowly

In March, she added a second habit: a twenty-minute walk after school, before she started marking. In April, she added a ritual she’d read about: a monthly check-in.

On the first of each month, she made a pot of tea, opened her journal, and answered four questions. What went well? What slipped? What do I want to keep? What’s one thing to change?

That first check-in surprised her. She’d done her morning habit on about four out of five days, and her walk most weekdays. She’d expected to feel she was failing. Instead, she saw progress.

#May: exam season

May brought exam season, and with it, sixty-hour weeks. Noor’s walks shrank. Some evenings she was back on her phone until late, too tired to do anything else.

But she had learned something from the spring. Instead of giving up, she used minimum versions: a five-minute walk around the block, two minutes at the window in the morning before checking her phone. It wasn’t much. It kept the habits alive until June.

#Summer: travel and drift

In August, she flew to visit her parents for three weeks. Her routines fell apart almost immediately. Different time zone, different house, long family dinners, late nights catching up with cousins.

She kept only one thing: an early morning walk with her mother, who walked every day without fail. It became the best part of the trip. They talked about things they’d never talked about on the phone.

When Noor got home, she felt the familiar pull to “start fresh” with a big new plan for the school year. Instead, she opened her journal and did her monthly check-in. Then she restarted with the ten-minute versions of her morning and walking habits.

#September to November: the long middle

The new school year brought a new problem: evenings. Lesson planning and marking would run late, and then she’d unwind with her phone until midnight. She was tired at work and short-tempered with herself.

At her October check-in, she added a third habit: phone downtime from 10 p.m., set up so that only calls and messages from family could get through. She put a novel on her bedside table. Some weeks she kept to it every night; some weeks, only half. She had a nasty flu during half-term and did almost nothing for ten days. She let that be okay.

In November, she sat down with her journal and looked back over every monthly check-in since April. She noticed something she hadn’t expected. She had never had a perfect month. But in almost every month, she had kept her habits on most days.

#December: looking back

On the last day of December, Noor read her January notebook with its eight abandoned resolutions. Then she compared it with where she was now.

She was sleeping about an hour more a night than a year ago. She’d walked most weekdays since March. She had read nine books, not fifty-two, but nine more than the year before. She called her brother every Sunday, a habit that had started as a check-in goal in June. Her mornings were hers again.

None of it looked like the transformation she had imagined in January. All of it was real.

She didn’t write eight resolutions for the new year. She wrote one sentence: Keep coming back.

“I used to think discipline meant never falling off,” she told a colleague who asked. “Now I think it means getting back on, again and again, without making a big drama about it. I never had a perfect month. I had twelve imperfect ones in a row.”