There’s been a lot of literature in popular culture around the power of habits, or atomic habits, micro habits that lead to big changes. It frames habits as your friend, something to harness and leverage to create new ways of being and acting or behaving as you go through life.

But what if habits were something we needed to be more careful of? What if we shouldn’t get attached to our habits, but maintained a slight gap between an automatic, habituated response and the inputs that come in from the outside world? From a stimulus to a response, habits sit in the middle; those neurological ruts in our brain function that provide us with shortcuts to getting things done more efficiently.

Of course, when we fall in love with who we are, and our habits, and get attached to them, we then find it very difficult to respond and change. But the bigger challenge with getting attached to your habits is that it creates discomfort: when your habit is running and expecting something, and not getting it.

For example, you could have a habit that says everything I do needs to have a monetary value. Or my body needs to have coffee every morning, and that’s justifiable and normalised in society, so it’s okay. Or I’ve worked hard today, I need to relax, and I’ve earned my drink of alcohol. Everything can be a habit if we run the routine often enough.

A lot of Buddhist philosophy talks about not getting attached to your habits, holding them very loosely, and always being vigilant with a third perspective. This simply says: if you see yourself acting out on the stage with all of your patterns and behaviours and habits, always maintain the ability to stay in the audience and watch yourself at play. It’s this third person perspective on your own life that allows you to opt in to the habits that you might be running on automatic.

Then the question comes, how do I maintain this distance, or perspective, on these habits that are running? And therein lies the challenge with the human condition.

Lately I’ve been putting a sticky note on my mobile phone as I go through my workday. It simply says: do you really need to pick up your phone? And I think quite often now, with all of my habits, I’ve got this imaginary post-it note in my mind just before I reach for some chocolate, or overdo my workout in the gym and put my body at risk, or have to say that one extra thing when I really possibly should just be quiet.

Putting these virtual post-it notes on your habits, or in and around where you’re executing these habits, could be a life hack worth experimenting with.

So what is good posture, and why do we need to consider it in our day-to-day life? When I was coaching track and field athletes, I used to talk about chest over knees over toes. This stance, where you’re stacked up straight, is a state of readiness, a state to go forward, backwards, sideways, or wherever you need to, in a balanced way. More recently I’ve been combining this with some thinking around meditation posture: a slight upward tug on the back of your neck, chin slightly tucked in, pulling the spine upwards. One is meant to allow you to execute action in the physical world; the other aims to allow you to consider your relationship with thoughts and whether they drive you to behave differently. But overall, both under the term of posture.

The mind-body connection for traditions such as Zen Buddhism is so tight that they don’t actually differentiate between the mind and the body. Taking the position, or the form, in meditation means that you’ve achieved everything the practice offers. In other words, the benefits are in taking the position, not necessarily doing it to achieve anything.

So I suppose I’m offering you to consider what it means to get your body in good shape and maintain it in good shape, and how it affects your mental state and your cognitive performance, which in turn allows you to maintain composure, think clearly and perform at your best, without being buffeted by the noise and distractions around you. To be making decisions from a place of centredness and detached perspective. To be mindfully aware not only of what’s going on around you externally, but of the internal dialogue you’re having with yourself: what you should do, when you should speak up, what’s your value in the current situation. Posture is a really amazing way to come back to a calm place from which you can execute a response, as opposed to an instinctive reaction to the stimulus that are constantly coming at us in the busy world we make our way through on a day-to-day basis.

So whether you’re doing stretching, flexibility, yoga, weight training, calisthenics or any combination of the above, I think we shouldn’t be ignoring the physical self and the impact it has on our ability to remain calm and make the wisest decisions we can with the experience we have. Being able to take control of our posture and use it as a means to return back to a centre has become more and more central in my life. And certainly it’s something I’m encouraging coaching clients to consider when they feel the external environment is overwhelming them, or their internal dialogue leads them to behave in ways that don’t let their best self come forth into their life and the world.

This isn’t a definitive list, but here are the eight things. They might be helpful to you. And I think it’s a nice way to think about life holistically: not just spiritually, or physically, or financially, or mentally, but a little bit of all of that, thrown in with a little bit of Eastern Zen philosophy for good measure.

Number one, I would say, is the foundational trio: what you put in your body, what you let your mind rest on, and how we interact with others. These three interdependent things have what I call consequential karma. I don’t know — it might be a three-hour, three-day or three-month rule, but whatever we do to our body, our mind, and how we interact with others always comes and gives us a dividend or a payback a little while later.

And of course I’m not going to get into this post about what you should and shouldn’t do for food. But the more I get older, the more I start to think really carefully about the physical impact of what I consume: the things I know that help me have great days, and the things I know — and science will back — will definitely, without any doubt, support me to have a day where I probably won’t feel good, perform well, and deliver value to the world. For example, I can’t tolerate alcohol anymore, not a drop of it. But I can have one or two coffees on the weekend. Small example, but you’ll have your own bargains you’ll make with yourself about food, whether it’s chocolate, beer or pizza. But it’ll have a consequence. It’ll affect how you feel, how you think and how you perform.

The other practice, of course, is something I’m going to call stillness, or reflective practice. Goodness me, today everyone’s on the go — push, push. How are you going? “Oh, I’m back to back in meetings.” Having reflective space is probably something that needs to be protected, like a small plant growing in the corner of your life. Without it being watered and nurtured and looked after, our ability to look down on your life and see it as a system becomes more and more compromised — meaning you’re stuck in the same loops and the same habits, without any opportunity to have a gap between the stimulus that comes into your life and the response that you have to it. Reflective, meditative and Zen practices have a lot to do to support you on this. For me, I’ve found how this works in terms of how I meditate, when I meditate, how frequently I do it, and what that means for me throughout my day. You’ll find your own way, but I encourage you to consider some sort of reflective practice. It could be as simple as writing a diary, or getting out into nature.

Lastly, the third of my trio: it’s the interactions we have with other people. Of course, how we show up and the energy and mood we have will affect how we show up to interact with other people. But I think we need to understand a little bit more around our style, or personality, and what we are looking to get from it when we interact with others. Some people need validation. Other people give energy in social settings; some people take energy. Some people reflect and are analytical; other people like to drive things forward, tick off tasks and get things done. There’s no right or wrong here. It’s just understanding how you work with and through other people to get things done.

Which brings me to the next point: understanding your own personality. For years I went through thinking people had it in for me. It led to me being quite sad and down and quite moody a lot of the time, when I just thought there were all of these — in inverted commas — evil, nasty people who had it in for me. They were just being who they were. As I’ve got older, I’ve reflected and understood that a personality that doesn’t necessarily combine well with mine doesn’t make them wrong and me right. It just makes us different. And the more time I spent understanding myself and my own personality, the deeper my ability to understand and have empathy for others — and I didn’t take things so personally anymore. So I encourage you to look at personality traits, and all those interesting tests you can take, to understand who you are and how you interact with the world and other people. You’ll gather data over time and draw a rich picture of who you are, how you show up, and who this person you call yourself actually is.

That gathering of data doesn’t stop at personality. Nowadays, if you’re interested in having positive, high-performance days, good mood and more up and energised experiences — and you want to manage the down and mitigate the chances of you having rough, really difficult days — I think collecting data is really, really important. And there’s been some really interesting research that’s come out over the last decade or so around leading indicators that tell you that your body is not in good shape, or you’re getting sick, or there are some things happening with you physiologically that you need to just be careful about and understand that you’re possibly going to be in for a bit of a spell where rest is more indicated than expending energy. Wearables that give you data on your heart rate, your sleep and all sorts of other indicators about the physical self can’t be ignored anymore. I think, as a tool used in moderation and intelligently, there’s no better way to validate how you’re feeling subjectively with what the data is telling you objectively. One example is heart rate variability: the time it takes between your heartbeats varies normally. The higher it is, the more you’re able to cope with the stresses of life, and the more chance you’re going to have a great day and be able to expend energy towards the achievement of your goals. There are many more indicators. I encourage you to consider this, even if you’re an anti-technology person.

I want to finish this post with something I’ve come to do when I’m not having a good day. First of all, I think it’s super important to know that you’re not having a good day. Life goes up and down. That’s normal. But if we look at what Buddhism teaches us about the Middle Way and impermanence, I think that we have a lot to consider.

I want to take you through a metaphor I quite often use. It’s about the mountain and the weather. A lot of what I try to do with myself, and when I’m coaching others, is to talk about us as a nice steady mountain. The weather is swirling above our head. Sometimes we have cloudy days, sometimes thunderstorms and lightning, sometimes sunny skies — but the mountain sits strong and stable, as mountains do. So when there’s bad weather, stormy skies, difficult times: just be a mountain. Accept it. Don’t try to get away or change it. Just be with it. The storm will pass. Impermanence is a universal truth. This too shall pass. The weather will clear, and the mountain will be there, watching the clouds disperse and the sunny skies open up.