Micro-habits: small steps to better wellbeing
When work and life pressures take their toll, making big changes can feel impossible. Micro-habits are small, manageable changes that contribute to sustainable improvements in wellbeing.
The legal workplace is characterised by fast-paced work and frequent deadlines, with an emphasis on delivering consistently high performance that can test the strength of even the most resilient lawyer. When pressure escalates to the point where you are not thriving, merely surviving, the risk to your mental and physical health becomes acute.
You may recognise that changes must be made, but when you are under extreme pressure, making big changes can feel overwhelming and unachievable. By adopting micro-habits, you can create incremental improvements at a pace that is manageable and sustainable over the long term.
What are micro-habits?
Micro-habits are small, repeatable actions that help us stay grounded, regulate our energy, and create healthier working patterns. They are designed to be realistic and achievable, even on a busy day, making small pockets of space that interrupt the stress cycle.
In our recent webinar, Lisa Whittleton of Jonathan’s Voice joined Alicia Koch of The Legal Belletrist and Frieda Levycky of Braving Boundaries to discuss the power of micro-habits to protect your mental health and promote long-term wellbeing, and how to effectively integrate them into your working day.
Self-awareness and the legal working environment
The first step to improving wellbeing is understanding how our professional environment affects us. A career in law is respected, hard-earned, and often forms a large part of our identity, meaning we adopt work styles that conform to lawyerly expectations of competence, composure, and endurance. “This leads to many carrying stress in a way that looks professional from the outside, but can feel catastrophic from the inside,” noted Alicia.
For lawyers, setting aside time for significant change can be hard to justify amid expectations of constant availability to clients and colleagues, alongside relentless deadlines and project demands. As pressure mounts, the motivation and energy needed to make change are eroded, and the cycle continues. It is vital to break the cycle before it breaks you, but the key is to start small.
Protective micro-habits
Protective micro-habits are aimed at safeguarding your mental health and providing a route to support when you most need it yet may be least capable of asking for it.
Alicia Koch shared some of the habits she has used to calm her stress responses and seek support:
- Put your nose in the fur of a dog or a cat. Ten seconds of warmth and a heartbeat that isn’t your own regulates your nervous system and has a calming effect.
- Dance in your kitchen – as badly as you like. Shifting the body when the mind won’t move unlocks dopamine pathways and helps break stress cycles.
- Choose a safe word that you say or text to your best friend or closest supporter that means you need immediate, in-person help. This makes it simpler to ask for help when you are least able to.
- Butterflies. Find one small, beautiful living thing and look at it closely for two minutes. Alicia said: “It’s a small reminder that there is an outside world that matters more than the world that is eating at you.”
- A cup of tea. Make a cup of tea that you actually drink – and enjoy the process of making it.
It’s also important to be aware of the changing season. Shorter, darker, colder days can affect resilience and energy levels. Alicia advises seeking exposure to daylight early in the day – even if it is just on your walk to the car – and being kind to yourself.
Developmental micro-habits: reframing your inner conversation
A high-pressure, high-profile job often requires time and energy sacrifices that can stop you from prioritising things that are important to you. Family, fitness, and fun can all take a back seat when work pressures increase. Frieda Levycky believes micro-habits can fit into the busiest day and build cumulative positive change.
She advises reframing your inner conversation from “behaviour” to “identity”. This makes changes less of a vaguely ambitious statement and more specifically achievable. Instead of saying “I should do more exercise”, be more specific with “I am a person who does 20 squats while the kettle boils”.
The same principle can be applied to common stress-inducing situations. Instead of “I need to find better work-life balance,” try “I am someone who protects my time and prioritises my well-being.” This might look like setting a boundary around doing the school run each day, or not replying to emails after a certain time. Frieda advises that “once you have decided on the change you want to make, each small habit becomes a vote for that person you are becoming.”
How to make micro-habits stick
The key to successfully adopting a micro-habit is brevity. Scale each new habit down so it takes no longer than two minutes.
For example, the identity statement “I’m someone who values my health and mobility,” translates to “I see how many steps I can take in two minutes.”
Next, link the new habit to your existing daily routine. Adding a two-minute exercise – either physical or mental – to activities such as brushing your teeth, boiling the kettle, or doing a client call, makes it much more likely you’ll stick with it.
Creating boundaries and pursuing long-term positive change
Adopting micro-habits highlights the importance of maintaining reasonable boundaries and modelling this behaviour to others. Leaders who demonstrate their own boundaries, respect others’ boundaries, and are open about the protective and developmental micro-habits they use give others permission to do the same.
Self-awareness should sit at the centre of your micro-habit endeavour. Frieda advises separating your personality from your role as a lawyer and evaluating where you want to spend your time and energy. By building micro-habits around the values at the core of your identity, you can start on the path to long-term positive change, becoming both the lawyer and the person you want to be.
For many more insights into adopting micro-habits, watch the on-demand webinar here.