Revealing My May Happiness Project

After a longer break, it is now time to pick things up where I left my Happiness Project earlier, and reveal a new area of focus. It is something I have down-prioritised for years yet realise could have been worked on much sooner, so let’s take a peek now! This post is part of my blog series The Happiness Project.

May Official Lunches

Official Lunch might sound cryptic at best, so I will explain. For a very long time now I have had a kitchen table, but rarely used it to eat my lunch at. Instead the usual vision has included me juggling a plate in front of a desktop computer or iPad somewhere else in my home.

I am definitely not there yet regarding actually eating at the kitchen table, but what this month is about is trying to eat whilst not working simultaneously.

Sharing Meals

In past jobs I have usually shared my meals with colleagues in a cafeteria or lunch restaurant, which has included at least 30 minutes away from work.

But working from home means eating by myself, and hence having slipped into treating it as a utilitarian moment, with no thought at all for the aspect of turning off work matters.

Time Blocking For Lunch

The disconnect has gone deep. In 2022, whilst sitting with a worksheet for time blocking in an attempt at picturing my ideal working week, I have indeed blocked out 30 minutes for lunch.

Yet for some reason this piece of the puzzle hasn’t really register until last month.

I have understood the value of a dedicated lunch break years ago, but not connected the dots in the context of working from home and stepping away from my tasks to have some personal time.

Habits Run Deep

It feels surreal when writing about it now, but also a valuable insight into how automatic our habits tend to be.

Habit partly implies subconscious behaviour, which in turn will demand quite a bit of active observation and analysis in order to be revealed.

This also explains why habits can be so undescribably difficult to change.

The Plan

So, lunch. I have had some success at taking a lunch break now by encouraging myself to jump back into the latest novel I am reading.

Calendar Is Key

Since there is no conversation to be had with others, eating is quite swift, which makes me twitchy to get back to work. Yet it is too soon if lunch is meant to be the long 30 minutes as per my healthy plan. Hence helpful novel to distract me.

As soon as I forget to use my calendar, I forget about this new lunch habit that I am working on.

But let’s spend some time on the backstory first, before getting back to the calendar.

Old Habits Die Hard

Blame games are easy to play when conveniently ignoring the complexity of a situation. We can smoothly criticise ourselves and others by implying laziness, lack of dedication and other nonsense.

It isn’t fair though, because we are up against habits, which may be surprisingly challenging to understand.

In my case it could be tempting to say stuff like “But why don’t you just sit down at the kitchen table and eat? Problem solved!” Yes, why don’t I?

Because I have no previous habit of doing this. After moving so many times in the past few years, both apartment layout and placement of kitchen table have changed too often for a new habit to form. In one flat I didn’t even have space for a kitchen table.

Then there is the glorifying of The Hustle. “Real Entrepreneurs” work around the clock without needing any sleep. Eating then means sitting at the computer, barely registering what the teeth bite into, before said fuel is efficiently transferred to the stomach. Right? Right! Ugh, no…

I slipped into a bad habit regarding forgetting everything about mindful eating, and now it is a massive undertaking to establish a new, healthy habit. It seems like such a benign, teeny tiny thing to change, but in reality is a perfect example of having to move a mountain in order to find myself acting automatically in a more desirable pattern.

The Helpful Calendar

There is help to be found though. For example a calendar can remind me.

This means I need to consult my calendar. Which in turn means I must remember to enter an appointment called Lunch on the schedule.

Step by step I can reinforce the new habit of taking an actual lunch break by creating these different critical points along the way, where I have to consciously move away from the old towards the new.

Acting in awareness is the only way to break the old habit.

It is hard and most likely there will be slipups, so be mindful if choosing to use a tool like creating a streak (for example 30 Days). A perfectionist might focus more on maintaining a perfect streak with no gaps than the habit itself, which is not healthy in my view.

Life happens and moderation, the happy middle, is the only way forward. In fact I think it healthier to learn how to handle a non-perfect streak and everything it involves, since perfection is unrealistic to maintain in the long run.

I “cheated” a bit by starting this Official Lunch project in April already, and there have been days of forgetting all about my fabulous new idea. This is what life looks like behind the scenes though. It is perfect in its imperfection!

Wrapping Up

I am eager to find out what my May report in early June will reveal :)

Be sure to grab a free worksheet for your own project by signing up for my newsletter below. The months are undated so you can start whenever suits you.

You find the blog posts of this series in their own collection by clicking on this button:

Please share in the comments whether you intend to join or not. And if you have decided what to focus on these first months, you are welcome to share what your own projects are about, too!

 

Photo credit: Hermes Rivera.