One Apple A Day #486 - travelling improves awareness
One of the good things about travelling is that it forces me to reassess my habits. Our life runs on habits. And of most of them, we are not aware. Without automatic habits, we would have to think deliberately before doing anything. That doesn't sound efficient at all. Luckily for us, our brain and body have the incredible capacity to identify and implement patterns that allow us to function efficiently in our environments. Automatic habits are vital elements of our life, as long as they are good ones. With good ones I mean the patterns that help us thriving and improve the quality of our life. But the same process also works for bad habits. The ones that don't support our growth but impact negatively on our life.
When behaviour becomes automatic, it also becomes invisible. So, most of the time we are not aware of our habits, nor we can't distinguish a good from a bad one.
Any change begins with awareness. There are three practices that I found helpful to gain awareness about our automatic habits. Introspection, using a tracking system and travelling. The first one helps you take a pause and observe your life from a new perspective. A tracking system can help you notice the effects of invisible behaviours in your daily routine. Travelling takes you to new environments and disrupts your habits. In my case, it forces me to reassess my morning rituals to understand which ones are essential.