75 Grow: An antidote to 75 Hard and the Winter Arc

On compassionate change & learning from Nature's pacing

Imagine some time from now— not necessarily a year, but the first day of summer, a brisk fall day, or the first free weekend you have at the end of spring. I want you to imagine how you would feel if just one or two habits were a bit different, and you had learned that you do have the capacity to change, without having to punish yourself or have it all fall apart (either after two weeks or in exhaustion after the finish line of 75 days).

This image is exciting, but for some of you, it probably is not as exciting as the vision 75 Hard or other Winter Arc challenges may bring about in you. I will not say that those challenges never work or are never an important part of someone’s wish to live in a different sort of way than they have previously. The image it offers to most of us is total transformation, to the extent of becoming the internet’s favorite word, unrecognizable. What I described in the above paragraph is not that of change that shows a drastic before and after, and it may be more of an inside job. However, what 75 Hard ends up being for so many is a failure, and a further proof that things will never be different. It offers a fantastical dream, but leaves most with the sense that change isn’t a thing they can do.

There are many problems to be had with the original 75Hard challenge—from the idea of what “mental toughness” even means, if a rigid list can truly be helpful for any person who takes it up, and I won’t even get into the wellness/diet culture of it all. I have a slightly different beef with it, and it’s both from my personal experience and my experience working with people, which is that it teaches us change and growth are only possible through intensity and perfection, and thus wraps people into the idea that change in habits is only valid or imaginable in the extremes.

I belief growth, change, and the ability to learn are one of the great joys of being human, but optimization culture and the self-help industry have bastardized this innate human joy. Think of yourself as a child, the first time you finally were able to ride a bike or play a song you liked on an instrument, or looked up at your mom after reading the story aloud for the first time. There is joy and amazement in our ability to navigate new terrains, and we know from the neuroplasticity literature that change and learning continue to be present throughout adulthood.

75 Grow is my version of positive change for the new year or new season. I view it through the lens of the scientific method, and so it’s changed since I first did it this fall, and before under the name 75 Build. It is also under a similar name to 75 Hard, so I can Trojan Horse non-BS evidence based health information into the wellness culture.

75 Grow adopts an understanding from both my learning on the behavioral sciences and the poetic beauty of the natural world. Winter, and the new Year, ARE a season of rebirth in darkness, and I think this shows us the pace of growing or changing. The point of which, I should add, is connection and cycles, not to become unlike what once preceded it.

Anyway, onto the evolution of this and the three habits, general format, which I will be documenting with longer form here, and shorter form on Tik Tok and Instagram.

On the first round of this challenge, I did 5 habits. This was too much change for me, and frankly I think for most people to be sustainable. Secondly, it added rigidity where it wasn’t needed or where my life, frankly, didn’t actually need to be changed or optimized. This time, we will do 3 habits. Before you scroll off, ask yourself this: why MUST you change so fast? And also, maybe if you keep falling off the other challenges, it’s not because YOU are bad, but because the challenge is too steep.

These habits are the ones I’m doing, but see the end of this post for 3 prompts on how to choose your own, or to personalize these.

1. Move More: Meeting the US Clinical Movement Guidelines.

   1. You can find them here. TLDR: I’ve been working on increasing little by little exercise I enjoy into my week over the last year. Mine will be mostly strength training on Evlo Fitness (a streaming, evidence based video format taught by 3 physical therapists!) and either jogging or dancing with the Fitness Marshall for cardio.

      

      From the current US Guidelines on Physical Activities

2. Avoiding Avoidance: ie a 45 minute timer each day, usually 5 minutes after I get home from work, in which I do the house tending or life tending I’ve been avoiding, with a special focus on closing shift aka clean sink, clean counters, and no laundry strewn about random chairs or places. It makes my life better when my life is navigable (and I don’t step on a random boot at 6:30 am).

3. Process of Creativity: ie 30 minutes of doing something creative each day, with a focus on writing fiction, ie Folklore, The Novel, that I’ve been working on and off for for three years. It needs to get completed in 2025. This also includes a general bend towards doing things rather than mindless consumption of the internet. Even when I’m getting great content from the internet, unless I do something with it sometimes, it feels like it freezes me

These habits are things I’ve already implemented in prior years in my life, and that work and framework still stands. I’m much better and less overwhelmed in these areas than I once was, and I’m in the middle of continuing to work on them. They have made my life better, but your life may require something different.

Over the coming week, and tomorrow specifically, I’ll be writing and documenting more on this, and let me start by saying we don’t try to do these three all at once either, at least not to this scale. We start by noticing our baseline, what habits actually matter to us to change to live a life we find more meaningful, and then inquire what the next small step is.

Before you pick a habit, ask if optimization belongs in this part of your life. The prior two habits I had additionally ended up being things I didn’t really need to change at all, but the cancerous idea of more, better, bigger as always better doesn’t just impact us in consumerism, but in our ideas of our self states as well. Three feels so possible, and so much less like impending failure. Don’t get me wrong—it still feels like a challenge, but it doesn’t feel like I’m preparing for something that is either going to need me to get rigid or just give up all together.

Here are prompts to help you individual MAP (Movement, Avoidance, and Process):

Movement: What would you like to be able to do? Does a push up, or getting back into sport or dance class, or feeling good at a workout class sound exciting to you? In what situations do you wish you had more strength or heart endurance in your day to day, or in special situations, like hiking on vacation or being able to lift luggage into the overhead bin? What did you used to love to do as a kid or now that isn’t sedentary, but you simply like? What would a 10% improvement look like in compared to your relationship to exercise now?

Avoidance: Where are the parts of your ordinary, day-to-day life that frustrate you or you feel behind on? Is it like me, having a clean sink and staying up to date on getting clothes away? Maybe you’re a parent, and it’s related to something with your children. Perhaps it’s feeling like you get home in the evening and just want to be horizontal, but would rather use that time differently. What is an area of your life that feels like it is not working, annoys you each day, and that you could trial new methods to try to learn and have it dealt with better?

Process of Creativity: Creativity really can be anything that doesn’t have pre-set rules, and that you can learn and grow in. It could be tailoring your clothes, cooking, painting, writing, sewing, gaming, designing on your iPad, dancing, really, truly, anything. What do you constantly see online or on your Pinterest board that you’ve always wanted to try? What is in the box of random craft or sport supplies you keep in your closet? What might be a way to lower your standard of needing to be “good at something” right away, and instead have one or two things you’d like to explore and play more with in the next 75 days?

I recommend keeping a tracker for this challenge, and an easy way to track each one. I’ll talk more specifics on my ways for tracking mine tomorrow, but rest assured that this is not a challenge where it’s EVERY DAY OR YOU MUST START OVER. What we are trying to do is mindfully improve our habit until it is closer, in a workable way, to what we would like it to be. For example, I don’t want to ever be at a point where I workout 7 days a week, but I’d like to be at 4-5, so my tracker will be about having 5 stars every 7 days, and similar with the creative process.

Alright, this has been lengthy. Let me know if you’re joining, and what’s on your MAP for the coming 75 days. <3