Rituals and habits can transform your life.

The right ones will give you a guide that can incrementally move you forward physically, spiritually, mentally, and even emotionally. As the saying goes:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
— Will Durant

Over the past few years, I’ve worked to become WAY more intentional in my life and one of the best ways to do so has been to follow daily rituals that pushed me forward.

It took a lot of trial and error, but I’ve found a groove of actions I do (almost) every damn day to help me feel ready, willing, and able to do my best.

Here’s what helps me and I hope it gives you some ideas on how to help yourself.

Write In My Gratitude Journal

Every evening, I write on a legal pad three things I’m thankful for that day. It’s not complicated and my handwriting atrocious, but I’ve only missed five days in the 13 months since starting it. (One was because of a snowstorm in Aspen and the other two were during trips to Montreal and New York.)

So far, of all the habits I’ve adopted in 2016, this had the most life-changing impact to me.

Within a few weeks, I noticed that my negative emotions weren’t as strong and didn’t last as long. I also noticed that how I saw myself — in the present and in the past — improved greatly.

And even on some particularly awful days, I always knew I could look back and find some glimmers of beauty. In a way, taking this journal, helped me see them more clearly.

Meditate

I’ve experimented with meditation for a while and I’ll say, first and foremost, it has NOT lived up to the hype. I didn’t suddenly become a woo-woo spiritual guy, life didn’t completely change, and I didn’t notice any improvements in HRV (which I’ll explain below).

But here’s what I can say: When I finish meditating, I feel a huge difference versus before I started. My mind is calmer and quieter. The world is more still. My mental chatter and internal dialogue subsides and the result is more perspective and clarity.

And THAT’S why I meditate every day. Because when I don’t meditate, I notice how unsettled I feel.

It’s almost as if I can’t afford NOT to do.

Breathing/Repositioning Drills

News flash: Breathing is important.

Problem is most of us do it incorrectly. This leads turns on the wrong muscles, turns off the right muscles, and creates all kinds of additional issues (pain, stress, etc.).

Next, we have natural asymmetries due to the nature of our body. But due to all kinds of reasons (which I won’t go into), we drift far from a neutral position. That causes injuries, poor breathing, and just a whole mess of sub-optimal shit.

So to address this issue, every morning, I do some quick breathing and repositioning drills to get my body back where I’d like it to be.

I start with a “90/90 Hip Lift” with a balloon.

Then, I’ll (usually) do a left adductor pullback, a right glute max, and an all four belly lift.

By the time I’m done, my voice sounds different and I feel awake. (My flexibility and mobility also improves.)

From there, time permitting, I’ll do some basic static and dynamic stretches to loosen my joints and muscles and get the blood flowing.

Exhale

When I’m out and about for a while, running errands, doing stuff, talking to people, making calls, working, writing, etc., I often catch my posture getting more and more inflated and extended. (Imagine the dude with the puffed up chest and shoulders pulled back.)

But it’s not a good posture. As my buddy, Joe Gonzalez would say, “That posture is perpetually falling.” It’s also stressful.

When I notice it as I’m walking (or waiting to jaywalk), I’ll do a nice, long, and hard exhale to get my ribcage back down and reset for a sec.

I have no clue if it does anything — to be completely honest — but it’s a nice reminder to tone down my overactive muscles and reset my positioning.

And if not, at least, it wakes up my diaphragm, which gets stiff with poor breathing and positioning.

Read

Every night, before I go to sleep, I read for at least 30 minutes.

I tend to read a lot of non-fiction during the day so at night, I try to keep it either light non-fiction (nothing too thought-provoking or complicated) or fiction.

Or I just say, “Fuck it,” and read Calvin & Hobbes.

Here are some great books I’ve read over the past two months or so:

• The Art of Racing In The Rain
• Never Split The Difference
• Your Erroneous Zones (three times)
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• The 5 Love Languages
• Easy French Reader (which is NOT SO EASY DAMMIT)

Take My HRV

HRV is your “heart rate variability.” Put in another way, it scores the balance within your autonomic nervous system that day. Put in another way, it assesses if you’re parasympathetically or sympathetically dominant.

Or, put in its simplest terms, it tells you if you’re stressed the fuck out or not.

It’s been a struggle and it’s forced me to learn more about my body than I’ve ever cared to know, but I enjoy it. It lets me know — within reason — how hard I can push myself each particular day, if there underlying things going on, and what the effects of yesterday’s exercise were.

Take A Few Supplements

I’m not a big supplement guy, but I do try to take a few things each day for better health and to make up for the things I may have missed.

Stress B-Complex. Basically, this is just a multivitamin with a lot of Vitamin B.

Pre/Probiotic. Good bacteria for my belly.

Magnesium. Western diets are usually deficient in magnesium.

Fish oil. I love fish, but this is just an easy way to get more Omega-3 fatty acids into my body.

Massage My Feet

This is weird, but here goes: Every night, before bed, I roll the bottoms of my feet on a baseball.

Sweet fancy Moses, it feels fucking AMAZING. It’s like a free massage — you dig your feet onto the ball, targeting the grooves and crevices of your foot. But it’s also great for the body too.

The bottom of your feet is where a major fascial train starts (the “superficial back line”) that actually goes to the very top of your skull. Release your feet and the rest will follow.

Walk

When I work, I use something called the “Pomodero Technique.”

Basically, you create “work” and “rest” blocks. The original technique was 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of rest, but I do 50/10 for my first two blocks and then 5 minutes less for each additional block (45/15, 40/20, etc.). The idea is to conserve your willpower and give yourself breaks so you don’t burn out quickly.

What you do during your break is kinda up for grabs. Sometimes, I like to watch highlights from the previous day’s baseball (Dodgers) and hockey (Kings) games. But if the weather is decent, I usually go for a quick walk around the neighborhood of whatever coffee shop I go to.

It’s a great way to turn off my brain, get some sunshine, get the blood flowing, move my muscles, get the stale air out of my lungs, and keep my mind sharp. It makes a big difference and, by the time I sit down, I’m ready for more work.

Hell, even if I didn’t walk during my break times, I’ll try to walk when I’m done for the day or in the evening. ANY excuse to get outside and move for a bit.

Write A Task List

Every night, I write out a “Task List” of things I want to accomplish the next day. That way, that shit isn’t stuck in my head while I’m meditating or getting ready for a restful night of sleep. (Who wants to meditate when they’re thinking in the back of their head, “Don’t forget to return that T-shirt?”)

I write pretty much all the tasks I’d like to knock out with one VERY important caveat:

There’s only three things I write at the top.

Those are the three, mission-critical things I want to do. If I do those three things and nothing else, I’ll be cool. Thus, I have to prioritize what things I can live without versus what I really really should be done the next day.

That way, when I start working the next day, I have a clear idea of my priorities and I can focus accordingly.

And that’s it!

Those are the main things I do without getting into the obvious ones like eat, sleep, take a leak, etc.

What are some daily habits you have and how have they affected your life? Let me know in the comments below.