A lot of us spend our earlier years going out, relating to others and socializing with friends. Some of us even build friendships in high school and college that last us for the rest of our lives.

For many of us who work a full-time job, it’s the time spent on the weekends with friends at backyard firepits, concerts or festivals that make things worthwhile. However we spend our time, one thing remains true: we often become who we choose to surround ourselves with.

Knowing this, it can benefit us at times to sit back and really reflect on our relationships — which ones are helping us, and which ones are draining our energy and hindering us. This of course doesn’t mean we need to coldly cut friends off, but merely stay conscious of how we get treated and affected by those we associate with.

[Finding Community Through Shared Experience And Struggle]

The term “self care” has many different meanings from person to person. It becomes especially important, if you spend alot of time at a stressful job or studying for school, to spend time doing little things that make you feel good.

That said, it’s easy to fall into the cycle of working all week while waiting for the weekend, and then spending the weekend getting drunk to forget the work week. If you’ve been here before, you know the spot.

We find ourselves stagnating and spinning in circles. Even worse, we might find ourselves deteriorating as we continue down an unhealthy path without ever taking our physical or mental health seriously. It can feel especially hard to escape when you have a group of friends who are doing the exact same thing and keep pulling you back in with them.

Redirecting our energy

Regardless of how we spend our youth, the most important step we can take as adults becomes the one towards bettering our health, even at the expense of a social life. It can feel difficult at first when building a new habit, but the longer we spend taking steps to improve ourselves, the easier it becomes.

When you chose to dedicate a large part of time towards bettering your physical health or developing a new skill, it can start to feel like you don’t have time to go out or see the same people you used to see.

Unfortunately, it’s also not uncommon, when we chose to make this lifestyle change, to feel like we’re losing friends and even family members or partners. These moments, while sometimes painful, can show us who’s truly in our lives for the right (or wrong) reasons and who’s worth spending time with.

[The People You Train With Become The People You Show Up For]

Even when you do decide to make the change, breaking bad habits and building good ones doesn’t happen over night. Most of us who try to change our habits and build a healthy routine will find ourselves slipping and “falling off” from time to time. For whatever reason, while it can feel extremely difficult to step outside of our comfort zone, it’s quite easy to fall back into the familiarity of our old ways.

Whenever we slip, it’s especially important to be kind to ourselves and get back on the horse without letting it snowball and get worse. Many of us who have made this change for the better have fallen and picked ourselves back up countless times. Motivation can be a great tool, but it will always give way to our discipline and desire when it comes to accomplishing goals.

So, should we spend all our time alone at the gym never making friends or new connections? I think we can all agree that doesn’t make a healthy option. In fact, the older we get, the more important our friendships and time spent with loved ones becomes.

But when we are looking to make an improvement that involves creating a significant change in our habits, there isn’t a much better way to achieve it than to shut out all the noise, welcome hermit-mode, and focus all our time, energy and efforts towards making it happen.

Having a period where all we do is wake up, go to work, go to the academy to train, then go home to rest and repeat can be a beautiful thing.

As Aristotle once said “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

[Transformation Amid Community: A BJJ Belt Promotion Recap]