Resilient Habits and Addressing Fear

Resilient Habits

Forming and maintaining habits has been very helpful to my happiness. Life is unpredictable so it’s important to build resilience into habits. A resilient habit is what I am seeking: a habit that I can continue even when life gets in the way. Missing completion of a habit for a few days should not mean the end of the habit.

Fear: fortress or soldier

When thinking about how to handle fear, including the fear that comes with anxiety, consider:

Do I want to be a fortress or a soldier?

A fortress is heavily defended but not very mobile. This imposes a certain amount of restriction that I don’t think I want in my life.

A soldier equips themselves and heads out to confront the fear in the world.

My initial reaction was that I want to be a solider. Taking this analogy a bit further: there are different kinds of soldiers. A knight is a mobile fortress. The baggage that’s being carried along provides a sense of security but severely limits mobility.

The idea is: you are a badass capable of doing the necessary to live your life. In this scenario, I wondered:

• Q: What’s the difference between a badass and an idiot?
• A: Competence.

This is an application of chill and accomplished.

In short: be a soldier and do what you can. Beyond that, entropy exists in the universe and do amount of anxiety or worry can conquer it.

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

Vaclav Havel