Here We (75)Grow AGAIN

The third official cycle of my gentle behavior change challenge, including journal prompts to get you started, our core four habits and ideas, and what I hope to get from it this year

My dear readers and 75 GROW Divas,

Happy August 1st, and welcome to year three of 75 GROW, aka my yearly behavior development challenge. This is year three, and with us starting yesterday on August 1st, it’s particularly infused with a joyful back-to-school energy that I’ve loved since I was a little girl, and have a feeling my reader-base may have experienced, too.

WAIT, I’m new here. What is 75 GROW again?

Three years ago, I was tired of what I was seeing online (and failing at in prior attempts in real life) with challenges that were very rigid. As someone who works in mental health, I know from the literature and the field that while sudden change is a method to growing, it is certainly not the only one, nor the most successful one on average. At the same time, seeing people grow and evolve to places they once couldn’t imagine for themselves is a big joy of the work I do as a psychiatrist. It is lovely to watch a smile break across someone’s face when they realize they aren’t where they once were, and this ability to surprise ourselves is a sacred thing about being human. When you only see strict challenges online, it may set you up to think that change only comes when you become unrecognizable. In a transformation culture, there is an implicit (and sometimes frankly explicit) message that who you are now is wrong, broken, and ideally to be shed. But what if we want to grow and start from a place of an innate sense of goodness? What if we viewed ourselves as we view the natural world—of which we are a part—and tended to things that grow over the course of time, not forsaking the seed for the tree but enjoying the entirety of the process?

The timing for this challenge originally came from the fact that I am an October Libra and I want to feel proud of my growth and connected to my life each year my birthday rolls around. To do that, reconnecting to habits that ground me and maintaining a flexible yet encouraging stance towards change is a necessity.

The original three habits went by the acronym MAP for movement, avoiding avoidance, and practicing/playing with creativity. This year, I’ve decided to add one more value in habit form with an S— for simplify. Don’t worry—my acronym still works—now we follow our MAPS as we work on growing together. :) Let’s get into each of these areas and how/why to apply them over these 75 days.

M is for a movement practice.

Exercise is good for us, and in an age of screens, it’s also often a time where you’re more in your physical body, even if you’re on a treadmill watching TikToks. It takes us out of the usual all-engaging digital world, and for many of us brings us into new spaces with new communities of people. It’s good for quality of leave and longevity, for anxiety and depression, and I think it also can be a source of surprise and skill-building based on what kind of practice you choose.

It’s very important with this one and each of the following that YOU choose, by the way. I will give you what I’m doing, and I’ll share along the way the ideas from others in this community, but it’s important that you tune into this as a process and not as a rule book.

I know—in some ways it would be easier if I would just TELL you what to do. Sometimes, that is the best place to start, especially when you don’t know where to begin. However, it also can be an excellent way to set yourself up for failure by picking rules and routines for some version of you that doesn’t exist and, more importantly, doesn’t EVEN NEED TO! Yes, goals are fun, and learning to do something you never thought you could is great, AND sometimes you’re just someone who doesn’t want to be a runner/yogi/Hyrox/whatever-aspirational-fitness-habit and your health and life will not be worse for the wear from you not forcing this upon yourself.

Each area of this challenge requires you to put your hands in the metaphorical dirt of your life. The “grow” for this isn’t just about the pace—it’s also about a gardener’s view of the world. You do not plant the seeds and come back 75 days later to blooms. A farmer doesn’t leave the farm until the harvest. You must tend to your life, and the questions every day make you actually know the texture of what you are growing. This mindset also accepts an inherent flexibility to the process: Maybe you try out joggin the next two weeks, and you find it intolerable no matter how small you make it. You switch to walking your dog at sunset and you love it. You’re getting more steps than ever, and hell sometimes you end up jogging a little with your dog when he REALLY wants to run. You will not know this if you require to know exactly how the growing of your garden will go. You must accept that there are parts of this—yes, even within the expanse of interiority—that remain a mystery. This can also be a great delight.

Here are a few ideas to pick from on how to approach this one:

• Pick a workout studio to try to this week that you’ve always wanted to try. Try out a similar class before you go by looking on YouTube or Tiktok for free resources. This will help you feel more confident going in.

• Pick a few places you’d like to walk or jog to this week, and use movement as transport to help you know your community and its August Nature this month.

• Intensify a practice you already have by committing to do some part of it daily. Pretend you’re back in high school and doing a fall sport, and see if you can remember how practice used to be (I did Cross Country, and am training for the Acadia Half Marathon this fall).

• Reduce a practice you’ve been very intense in this summer. If you are someone who struggles to let movement just be fun, challenge yourself to slow down, take a stretching class, do a yoga video under candlelight or dim lamps at home before bed some night. Find an element of movement that is new to you or under-explored.

• None of the above, and ask yourself each day at the same time, “What movement sounds intriguing to you today, Body?”

Avoiding Avoidance.

My beloved aka avoiding avoidance. You may know this from the avoidance diaries or the avoidance Advent calendar, which I do in the winter each year, and is one of my most popular series on TikTok.

Avoidance can mean a lot of things. I’m not talking about attachment styles in this case. Avoidance in this case is more about procrastination or moving away from things in our life that elicit challenging emotions, thoughts, or sensations. The avoidance usually ends up costing us more as we end up actively trying to push them away. Then, you might end up on the opposite side—finally, the pressure mounts enough that you run through it efficiently or multiple tasks at once, and end up relieved and exhausted on the other side. Both parts of this equation are equally the problem. If we avoid avoid avoid, we end up in situations that are unpleasant and require intense activity to fix. That burst of activity reinforces that we can not only get ourselves out of tight situations, but also that work will be intense and a lot and all at once by force or else disaster will arrive. Certainly, mental health impacts how this shows up in our lives, and willpower isn’t enough alone in many cases to push us through. However, even in those cases, executive functioning skills still help, and that looks like breaking things down into small steps, taking breaks, noticing successes, and reinforcing work that is regular and paced.

This one also will not let you check out—if you pick a bunch of things ahead of time, some of you will be able to successfully force your way through. Having a list is not a bad idea, so you can remember one in the moment. However, you still need to check in with yourself when it comes time, especially if you’ve tried things like this before and fallen off when you couldn’t get yourself to follow your perfect plan. We must make the step the right size, and that requires knowing what is going on for you each day.

This doesn’t mean we won’t have unpleasant levels of challenge in this—these are tasks you have been avoiding for a reason. I just want to urge you to not swing into the all-or-nothing pattern that has perhaps been the main route you took prior.

One of the things you can do this first week is pick your time increment. The biggest thing will just be picking a time amount at first, and I recommend starting small, especially if this is something where there’s a lot of dread, a lot of overwhelm. So whether that’s five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, just don’t make it too big. Starting the thing you’re avoiding is obviously an important part of this process, but so is stopping around the amount of time planned to work. This will avoid us getting into the overdoing-underdoing rollercoaster.

Play or Practice: Your choice.

Substack is going to get mad at me pretty soon if I don’t wrap this guide up soon, so let me repeat that these four themes will be what we will be circling back on all 2.5 months.

Play is something I think often about as a fellow in child psychiatry. There is a saying that play is kids’ work, and the way they work things out. To me, a life of creativity is a life of having enough freedom to enter the flow of play and the practice of hobbies. It’s something that we often feel like we don’t have time for and a big reason for that is how nefariously engaging social media and scrolling is. Scrolling is immediately entertaining and good-feeling producing, whereas even the best play session takes some time for you to settle into. This means both for kids and adults, that a new obstacle makes it harder for us to be in our playtime that we know we want. This habit is about enduring that little bump of difficulty each day to ask your brain to wander and make something.

What I’d recommend is you practice flexibility in this one by having two approaches: one creative hobby you’d like to work on this challenge, and then a charcuterie board of little things that make you feel in a flow state. For me, writing will be the core habit and enjoying the design of my socials in a more funky way. The little ones on my list that fit more into the “Creative life” bucket is broad, but includes: reorganizing the nook I read in, and rearranging it until it fits a feeling I want, making a new recipe, decorating a cake for a random holiday, picking out a fun nail design based on a book or movie or painting I’ve loved, picking out a really good gift for my niece’s birthday, or messing around with the water colors or sewing maching in my closet. Sometimes, you’ll want to focus on the thing you’re growing, and that might take a bit more will power, especially if you’re just starting. Sometimes, you’ll want to be creative and engaged in some broader way across how you live. Let that choice be there for day-of you, and trust the growing process.

Simplify & Declutter your space.

You may be thinking (and I may be thinking sometimes…) that there may be overlap between avoidance and simplifying at times. Yes. For example, the back of my trunk has had a bag of things I decluttered months ago that really need to go to the charity shop. Doing this would be both avoiding avoidance (the lingering task…) and simplifying (more open space).

I think about this habit as one of creating breathing room. I’ll give you some ideas below, but my hope for myself and you all with this one is that we tune in daily to ask if something could be a little less complex, a little less rushed, a little less perfect.

Simplify could be as simple as why do I have like 20 forks when I’ve never needed more than like 12 forks? Declutter them. Someone asked me if I wanted to do this thing at work, and I don’t. I really don’t have to, and I feel slightly uncomfortable saying no because I usually say yes, but maybe I am going to say no, so I just have an hour to chill. Every time you open that one cabinet, something nearly falls out, and it’s because you have aspirational food you want to cook but you might never cook and oh by the way, it expired in March that fills up the cabinet. Get rid of it.

Doesn’t it feel nice to not feel like a sardine crammed into your own life? I want you to having swimming room, little sardine.

As we go from August into the fall, fall is when nature starts to simplify, too. We can learn from Her.

Now, go tend to your garden.

Ask yourself now:

• How could I move today for 15 minutes?

• How could I take a step towards something scary, for 15 minutes?

• What’s something creative I could play with tonight for 15 minutes?

• Where can something be simpler and slower this week, that I could make simple today?

Remember, the process of growing is in and of itself a lovely thing.

I’m excited to see what happens for us all this season. The next letter will be free, and across other socials I consistently put out free ideas around this. If you want to make sure you get the weekly letter for the next 73 days, make sure to subscribe, and to get every one, consider subscribing for the cost of an expensive, overpriced coffee in Boston, aka $8 a month. My paid subscribers get access to all newsletters and make all of my writing possible across all socials.

Take care & take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day