I had my second baby four months back. Alhamdulillah for that. You know how crazy it gets with a newborn in tow!
I had no routine. I was up and about the whole day. I was sleep-deprived. I was also recovering from a C-section.
Somewhere in the middle of night when everyone had slept and the chores were done, I would get some minutes of peace to myself.
It was the middle of the night where I felt like I had some power over my time. It was my self-care break. I’d put my feet up, open a bag of chips and scroll through my I-pad because that was the best I could do!
(Give me a thumps-up if you can relate)
This is exactly what you call the trap of revenge procrastination. You don’t have any control over your time during the day. So at night when everything is done and dusted, you stay up late at night doing things you love doing.
This of course, exhausts you and puts you in more sleep debt.
Now at four months of postpartum, the baby can sleep through the night but I can’t.
My whole sleep cycle is disrupted. And that’s not the worst part –
Exactly at midnight I get up from sleep, feeling hungry. And not just hungry, I feel voraciously hungry, like I could eat an entire pizza.
Now it has started to piss me off.
A habit is created when there is a response following a stimulus.
A stimulus is when you decide that you want something to eat. The response is eating. Ideally that response should be intentional – “Do I really want to eat or am I just bored?”
But when you don’t check in with yourself and dive into the temptation, it becomes a reaction rather than a response.
Every single time you react to the impulse of ‘eating something nice’ by opening a bag of chips, you strengthen the circuit of the (bad) habit in your brain.
The same goes for staying up late at night scrolling your social media feed and plugging yourself into mini bursts of dopamine. This rigs the normal reward circuit in your brain.
My reward circuit is definitely rigged right now!
I need to work on this stat!
Just sharing it here to tell you how some unintentional actions might change your body physiology and in turn your behaviors.
Looking forward to work on getting rid of this bad habit.
Have you developed any bad habits so far? Please feel free to talk about it in the comment section.
