How can you remember what you just don’t remember?
You take upon yourself to say a few daily perakim of Tehillim, or learn two halachos a day. You decide to look up from your screen every 20 minutes while you work, to avoid eyestrain. You resolve to take vitamins every day, take a deep breath once an hour, and walk for five to ten minutes.
When you try to install a new, positive habit, it can feel like uphill work to repeat the action more than a handful of times. After all, the action doesn’t easily come to mind, and if you could have incorporated this positive action into your daily routine, you would have done so years ago! How can you remember what you just don’t remember?
The first line of offense is to set up reminders: sticky notes on the bathroom mirror to call the teacher or feed the fish; car keys in the fridge to remind you to bring lunch to work; ring on the opposite hand to remind you to pick up the dry cleaning. Or employ the tech equivalent: appropriately named alarms that go off one or more times a day.
These are all very effective — until they’re not. How long does it take until you no longer see the small yellow paper that started out as glaringly obvious, or until you get used to wearing your ring on the other hand? Repetition renders reminders invisible. And hitting snooze on an alarm is so common as to be cliché.
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