Habits Help: The Science of Forming Habits to Support Your Climbing, Mountaineering, and Backpacking
I structure my days around a few core habits. I start my day with a workout. I wake up early, before my wife or my boys get up for their days. Sure, it started because I wanted to stay in shape for my mountain climbs. Then, it became about having some time to myself in a day that would inevitably go off the rails because of infants or work or eventually toddlers or whatever. If I got my workout in, first thing, I would have done one small thing for myself within the day. But, eventually, it was about teaching my boys the habit of fitness. Now, my workouts start on my own and finish with my sons joining in.
Now, my workout also a part of my mental health. The routine sweating and endorphins help. It’s reached the point that the momentary suffering of any one particular workout falls a distant second to the reinforcing habit the occurs every morning.
I’m a big believer in the power of habits. I tend to approach most of the things I want to change in my life through the lens of creating or shifting a habit. Vitamins in the morning. Turning my clothes back from inside-out to the correct orientation before putting them in the laundry (saving me time when I do the laundry, later). Even these videos and blog posts follow a routine of a production schedule, requiring certain activities each day of the week.
Certainly, I have bad habits, too. I tend to lick knives clean rather than rinse them - which seems like a rather stupid risk to take with my tongue.
But, generally, I think about habits as something to be harnessed. Knowing that it takes a pretty good number of days to establish a habit - as I describe in the video - I don’t usually try to change a whole bunch of things about my behaviors at once. I will take a few weeks to establish a new habit that I want, and only then move on to another one.
Incidentally, that’s also why I’ve never done “New Year’s resolutions.” There’s never a bad time for me to establish an improving habit, and if I try to stack a whole bunch of them together, I am less likely to be successful.
And so it goes for my outdoor skills and practices. I apply the same conscious approach to self improvement. I’ve spent hours working on knots, hanging from the climbing wall to build anchors, and working on rappel transitions for multi-pitch descents. I’ve made it a point to put my gear away (or hang it to dry) immediately upon return home (before I get too comfortable and lose motivation). I’m fairly religious about applying and reapplying sunscreen. The list goes on and on.
Each one was a thing I had to consciously do (and sometimes forgot to do) until it became a habit, a reflex, something near a certainty. That, in turn, has created the mental space for me to take on the next thing to habituate.
In the video, I make a few claims worthy of citations. So, here they are:
Small variations in training help muscle memory
Pros and cons of breaking a skill into parts
I hope you find this information on habit formation to be helpful to you as you approach your outdoor adventures. Heck, I hope it’s helpful as you approach your day-to-day life.