Slow Living + Micro Habits
How Micro Habits can help you slow down and live better!
This voiceover is an audio version of my Slow Sunday Letter below. It is unedited, so may have some stutters, imperfections, and background noise. I hope you enjoy listening to it anyway!
Welcome to Generosity of Spirit, a space to share my slow and gentle living philosophy, alongside my love of books and reading. Please do subscribe to join me on this gentle journey of discovery and receive my Slow Sunday Letter straight into your inbox.
Welcome back to another Slow Sunday Letter! I hope you have had a slow and gentle week.
If there was an invisible string tying together Slow and Gentle Living it would be formed of micro habits. Slow Living is built on a foundation of intention, and gentle living is built on a foundation of self compassion. What they both require to be impactful is micro habits. In today’s Slow Sunday Letter, we are going to explore micro habits together - so grab a cuppa, get cosy and let’s see how building some micro habits of your own can help improve your life!
What are Micro Habits?
Micro habits are defined as small, manageable, simple daily actions that build up to help you achieve your aspirations.
We live in a world that champions instant gravitation and immediate results, this can often lead to impatience and a pressure to set goals that are ambitious and deliver immediately. If we don’t meet these high standards, and start seeing instant results from our goal setting, it can quickly turn toxic and negative, as we lose faith in ourselves. Our motivation dwindles, our self confidence plummets and we turn against ourselves assuming that our lack of will power or ability was the problem.
But what if the problem is that we are all too used to ‘biting off more than we can chew’? In our desire for instant results, we don’t allow ourselves the slow burn of success.
Micro Habits are tiny, every day actions that over time build up and stand strong with you. The little and often approach… the small daily commitments that make change truly possible.
The most important thing to remember is start simple - start small - let’s just get started!
Micro Habits To Transform Your Life
“In order to design successful habits and change your behaviours, you should do three things. Stop judging yourself. Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviours. Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.” BJ Fogg
In Tiny Habits, behavioural scientist BJ Fogg argues that the best way to change behaviour is to start small, celebrate small wins and accept failure as part of the process.
Fogg encourages us to identify our aspirations, based on our genuine want or motivation to achieve it, and then place it within the realms of our capabilities. From here we can break it down into tiny changes, he explains, we must ‘make the behaviours so tiny that you don’t need much motivation’.
The key is to make it easy for yourself. When designing a new habit, we are really designing consistency, and for this to be successful we must first realise the importance of simplicity, ‘simplicity changes behaviour’.
Identifying an ‘anchor’ that is already present in your life, allows you to cement your new habit within an existing foundation. Fogg refers to this as a ‘prompt’, that you will see naturally in your daily routine, which should then spark your new habit. For example, placing a breathing exercise alongside making your morning cup of tea. Incorporating anchors, means we are no longer just relying purely on our motivation but on several cues throughout the day that remind us to take a small step towards our new aspirations.
To achieve consistency we must celebrate! Acknowledging and celebrating your wins, your micro habits, is so important. Creating positive loops in our brain, so we feel the positivity and benefit of achieving our micro habits.
Slow Living + Micro Habits
So how can micro habits help us slow down?
When we are overwhelmed and stressed, we often feel behind and stuck. Micro habits break our intentional actions down into tiny manageable steps, which gets us moving in the right direction. You can implement these into your daily life and in turn experience the beauty of slow living. When we slow down and appreciate what we have, we can make room for what is important in our lives. Our attention is centred, we have balance, and hold calm.
Five Areas Of Your Life To Examine
I want to identify five areas of your life that could benefit from a little overhaul of your micro habits:
The Morning
Breathing
Nourishment
Rest
The Quiet
Think about what micro habits you could adopt, or what tiny changes you could make in these areas. How could your micro habits influence and encourage a slow and gentle life, one tiny step at a time.
The Morning
Morning routines are different for everyone, but it is such a great place to start! Try waking up a little earlier so you can incorporate some micro habits into the first few moments of your day. The most important thing, is taking your time! Waking up in a way that feels good for you. You will be so surprised by how much more calm and relaxed you will feel when you spend just a few extra minutes each morning doing something that nourishes you.
What will you spend those extra few minutes doing?
Opening the window and let the fresh air in
Drink a glass of water
Write (journal, morning pages)
Make a warm comforting drink
Reading a few pages of a book
Do some gentle movement
Write a ‘to-do’ list or your intentions for the day
Breathing
The most simple exercise, and something we all do every day without giving any attention to it. Breathe. Increased anxiety, tension and stress in our lives can lead to more rapid and shallow breathing. By introducing breathwork we can use breathing to affect how we feel. This allows us to relax, and our whole body to restore and rebalance itself.
A Breathing Exercise at home
Find somewhere comfortable to sit.
Place one hand over your heart, and the other on your stomach
Breath in slowly and deeply through your nose. You should feel your hands moving with your body.
Make sure your breath is originating from your diaphragm, and not your upper chest (your upper chest should not be rising in an obvious way).
Breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds and breath out gently through your mouth for 4 seconds – do not force the air out.
Keep your breathing slow, relaxed and controlled.
You can play around with the timing of your breath cycle. Do what feels right for you.
Nourishment
Take the time to nourish your body. Focus on tiny changes that you can use to influence how you nourish yourself. I like to meal plan on a Sunday - it is a small habit, but looking in the fridge and writing a shopping list before going shopping can make a big difference. Or making time to look through my recipe books when I am having an afternoon cup of tea, and noting down recipes I’d like to try the following week. Meal planning can help you maintain a varied diet whilst also reducing waste.
Make sure you include protein and fat in your breakfast (nuts, seeds, yogurt). These will balance blood sugar levels and energy levels throughout the day.
Try a new wholegrain or pulse every week. For example, wild rice, butter beans, buckwheat or quinoa.
Eat the rainbow – try to eat a range of coloured vegetables and fruits, every day.
Rest
Embrace sleep and rest. Make time to replenish your energy. Even a few minutes of peace and quiet and slowing down will nourish your spirit.
Go to sleep a little earlier, and try to limit your phone use before bed. I have started to read before bed and this is such a nice small adjustment to my routine that has added so much peace and calm to the end of my day.
Give yourself permission to rest! Tiny adjustments can reduce chaos and invite calm. Putting on some music, lighting a candle, going out for a gentle walk. If you want to have a nap, or sit quietly with your cup of tea. Make sure you take your breaks at work!
Small changes can really impact your day in such a big way. When we adopt a slower mindset we switch off our auto pilot and focus our attention on the present.
The Quiet
Allow for stillness and quiet in your life. Instead of reaching for a device to occupy your spare time, allow for stillness. Just allow yourself to be in the moment. In the still and quiet you can tap into your creative and authentic self. Enjoying the little things, and taking the time to observe the world around you.
Nature changing, the light changing through the day, the sounds of your house. Take your time to cherish the simple pleasures in life we often overlook. Life tends to move slower when you take the time to notice the life around you.
Micro Habits : Journal Prompts
Please feel free to use the following journal prompts to think about how micro habits could impact your day to day life. These journal prompts should help redirect your energy, and achieve some introspection which should help you identify which areas of your life could benefit the most from some tiny changes.
What does an ideal day look like to you?
How do you wish your mornings looked?
How do you indulge in self care?
What is one area of your life you would like to slow down?
What is the one daily habit you are most proud of?
How do you invite calm into your life?
What distracts you the most from what is truly important to you each day?
What is the most important habit you do for yourself every day?
What aspect of your life would you like to change the most?
What is your idea of a perfect night-time routine?
The 1% Wellness Experiment by
Micro-gains to Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day
If you want to read more about micro habits or want more guidance I can highly recommend
book ‘The 1% Wellness Experiment - Micro Gains to change your life in 10 minutes a day’.This book was certainly a springboard of possibility for me into what I could gain with tiny changes throughout my life. Gabrielle’s book challenges you into a month long experiment- using 1% of your day for 1 month to focus on you. I love how she guides you through this process, demonstrating that you don’t need to devote hours and hours to see changes in your life. Rather, micro gains through micro habits can all add up to improve your overall wellbeing.
You don't need to devote hours to work on your wellbeing: you can improve your life by taking just 1% of your day to focus on your mental and emotional health.
There are 1440 minutes in every 24 hours. Subtract the optimal 8 hours’ sleep and 1% of your waking hours is just under 10 minutes.
Using the concept of marginal or micro-gains – tiny changes that add up to a big impact – this book invites you to enter into a month-long experiment with yourself:
Use 1% of each day for one month to experiment with a range of actions to improve your mental and emotional health.
Actions include establishing boundaries and saying no, overcoming comparison and handling anxiety, dealing with perfectionism, people-pleasing and creating habits. They are designed to improve your mood and increase your happiness without, crucially, taking up your valuable time.
By the end of the experiment you will have created your own bespoke tried-and-tested toolkit packed with techniques to lower your stress, strengthen your self-confidence, nurture your connections, instil calm and increase joy.
I hope this Slow Sunday Letter has given you something to think about when it comes to incorporating micro habits into your life. By focusing on small, manageable changes, we can begin a journey of intention, embrace slow living and work towards our aspirations. This is a lifestyle, not a hack. Micro habits are so powerful and implemented in the right way for you, can lead to making long lasting, transformational changes to your life.
I would love to know your thoughts, and if any of this resonated with you. If you feel able, please do share in the comments below.
Thank you for being here,
With Light & Love
Emily xxx
My content is completely free, but you can buy me a coffee following this link!
If you enjoyed this post, found it useful or want to help me spread the word about how enriching Slow & Gentle Living can be, please do like/leave a comment or share/restack to help others discover Generosity of Spirit. Thank you for reading!
Micro-habits. Interesting.
i've recently moved to spain to reset my life, and now most of my days consist of micro-habits that bring me small daily pleasures. it's a quieter life but very fulfilling.