Human beings inherently prefer routine and habits. In this video, Dr. Carrie shares about her experience moving and how to habit stack when you're going through transition and change.
I have moved 16 times in 16 years. It takes about three months to kind of get muscle memory in an area of your life when there's change. What do you need to do in your life to help you have less chaos around you?
I have moved 16 times in 16 years. And all of these moves happened after the age of 22. So some of them were two, three times a year. The longest I've lived anywhere in my adult life after college was two and a half years. And so you could see some of those happened a lot in there, right? And I always tell people that the hardest part of moving for me is not the packing, unpacking, just getting established. It's the routines of life. It's figuring out the best route to the grocery store. It's figuring out the back roads, if there's traffic.
And also inside your home, it's figuring out where the light switches are, because you have to kind of get muscle memory when you figure out where light switches are. Like. Like, I know it's on this portion of this wall. And to be able to access it, like, in the middle of the night when you're groggy, it's just muscle memory. You have to learn. And it takes about three months to figure out where the light switches are and kind of get your bearings for your space, no matter how big or how small it is.
And I think about this a lot, especially now that I'm moving again, because that's a really good barometer for also how long it takes human beings to kind of get used to a new thing. Right? It takes about three months to kind of get muscle memory, to get comfort in an area of your life when there's change. And as I'm embarking upon my next move, hopefully this one will be for a year, but it probably will be another couple, few years here of moving around a little bit till I'm settled, and that's okay.
This is a good, exciting move. And even when we do things out of excitement and that are good things, the change itself can just bring stress to human beings, because we are creatures of habit. We have been since the beginning of time, and we like routines, we like habits. We like knowing the best way to get to the grocery store. We like having these habits and just the ability to be comfortable, because when our life is kind of chaotic around us, it makes us feel a little bit chaotic inside. So, as I'm embarking upon this next move, I've been reflecting on that a lot.
What do you need to do in your life to help you have less chaos around you? And, you know, maybe. Maybe you do move a lot. Maybe your family's in the military. Maybe this is just a constant thing for you. And. And maybe that means I need to find stability in another area of my life. For me, that looks like going to the gym at certain times of the week. Like, I know that on Wednesdays I go to my noon class at the gym. I know that I go to church at this time on Sundays. I know that I go to my prayer group at this time on Tuesdays.
And just kind of having those stable things in my calendar really helps me when my schedule is kind of in flux and my external environment is in flux. So I would encourage you that if you are in a place in your life where you're kind of in like an external chaos and maybe it's moving, figuring out those small things that you can habit stack, that you can create some routine in your life, it really helps calm your nervous system, because as a human, that's what we crave. And so I would encourage you to think about what are some of those things that I can do in my life as I'm trying to still figure out where the light switches are in my house because I just moved.
So thanks for tuning in. I hope this video was helpful for you guys. God bless. Bye.
