One way to stay on the upward spiral is through habits. First identifying and then doing the habits that help you be the person that you want to be.

Another way is through constant refining of those habits. I don't mean in a harsh, self-flagellating way ("I must make every run faster than before come hell or high water!"). Quite the opposite. I mean refinement that comes from curiosity, from wondering the ways in which you can do something better.

This is a process I like to call "Ever Better."

It sounds like a "never satisfied" approach to life. And I guess it is. But it's done in ways that's fun, making things into a game rather than a battle.

For me this has recently manifested this way:

With the habit of daily yoga, I recently experimented with skipping a day. I've been to a yoga class everyday for over a month, having only missed a day in early January because of taking my cat to the emergency vet. Missing a day does just happens sometimes, and I now know to expect that once a month.

This month I missed a day because I had some car problems and it became obvious that taking the car in was a better choice than forcing it to get me to yoga first. This resulted in me missing a morning class and with my schedule, I was unable to get to an evening class. The next day I felt exhausted and inertia creeped in so I ended up skipping yoga and spin. After two days without exercise, I could tell the difference in my mental health immediately. I began snapping at people I love, catastrohizing all kinds of things in my life, and started to feel depressed.

If you've interacted with me at any point over the past two weeks, you would have met someone who was quite the opposite. I owe my now-normal-chipper attitude to daily yoga and frequent exercise.

Yesterday, I forced myself to go to a yoga class even though I so didn't want to. I won't lie, the class was more of a struggle than they had been lately, but a few hours afterwards, I felt the edge of the depression lift a little. It gave me the push to arrange my day today to make sure I got to class.

But another area of consistent habit and refinement is with my daily writing and blogging practice. As I've written before, I have a system where I write my draft in a website called 750words.com. This website keeps tallies on your streaks (as well as all kinds of other neat data) and for me, seeing that increasing number of "x days in a row" is a great incentive to open it up and write every day.

However, I have learned through doing this for over 6 weeks now that if I don't write, publish, and post in the morning, it will likely run the risk of not getting done. With my commitment to blog everyday for a year, I just can't in good conscious let this happen. Plus, when I don't do this practice in the morning then it hangs over me all day. Or, like what happened last night, I'd be relaxing on the couch getting ready to transition to the bed and then jolt up to realize that though I wrote my blog I did not post it.

So today I got up extra early to get my writing done before leaving for an early yoga class ... the only one I could make it to with my schedule today. Some may see this as pushing oneself but I find that writing, even early in the morning, is really an essential part of my self-care. It's where I show up for myself. Learning to do this is an ever better way is increasingly important for me.

So you tell me:

Are there certain habits that, however small, are an essential part of your self-care each day?
What have you learned about how to do those recently that help you refine getting them done?