Motivation vs. Habit

I have struggled this month with finding the motivation to get back on track with anything. I started the year taking classes at the gym at least four days per week, sometimes everyday that week. I felt great and it was definitely showing my progress. Because of the feeling I got from exercising I was eating better overall. Yes I still had my sweets, I will always have my desserts, but I was incorporating a lot more fruit and lean protein as well as not overindulging. This led to sleeping better and having more energy to focus on tasks such as re-landscaping my backyard, a project over a year in the works. It also made me more determined than ever to get my name out there and push forward with my writing career.

Sometime around the beginning of April something changed for me mentally and I fell of the wagon. I had printed out three books that needed to be edited yet I hadn't touched a single one. I stopped writing other than blog posts and even those felt like they took far more effort than they should have. I even had put all the books I was reading away. I quit my research and fell into a funk. This depression created a feeling of being lost and killed all my ambitions. I have since struggled to sleep enough that I wake in time for work let alone get a workout in beforehand. My eating is the same for the most part but I am just not able to break through the mental fog.

I posted about a week ago asking people in different writing groups if they ever struggle with motivation and was greeted with many dealing with the same battle. Then there was one comment that said motivation was not the issue, I need to develop a habit. It is significantly easier said than done. My obligations and schedule change weekly making a habit of a certain amount of time for anything nearly impossible. I operate more on a fit things in like a Tetris puzzle system than a schedule time and make appointments style. For me it isn't that I can't find the time though, fitting things in has become a specialty. It is more that I need the motivation I was speaking about to pull me from my rut and help get me back on track.

A dear friend and fellow author has created a challenge I am going to try calling it the 5-2K challenge. For one year every day you must run / walk 2K steps, edit 2K words, read 2K words, write 2K words and eat 2K or less calories. I am joining her hoping that the challenge will pull me out of this block I have and get me working again. The best news is that is you fall short on something you can make it up another day. I will be trying to monitor it monthly as well as for the year to keep my goals on track and will post here periodically as to how it is going. What types of things do you do to pull yourself out of a funk?