A year ago, I kicked off 2025 by writing three short posts in three consecutive days about “new habits.” Each one focused on a single habit I was trying to bring forward, not as a New Year’s resolution, but as a quiet commitment to behave differently. Meditation. Splitting meals. Weight training.
None of them were flashy, and none of them were about becoming a new person overnight.
They were about testing whether small, repeatable choices could compound into something real.
This post is a look back at how those habits actually held up under a full year of real life, along with a look at what I’m carrying with me into 2026 and what I’m not.
2025’s New Habits
January 1, 2025 – Meditation
I started 2025 by writing about how meditation quietly but decisively entered my life in late 2024. What began as curiosity, sparked mainly by watching Rocky commit to a 10-day Vipassana retreat, turned into a daily practice that surprised me with its impact. I wasn’t chasing enlightenment. I was paying attention to calmer reactions, clearer thinking, and measurable changes in my body, as shown in Oura Ring data, such as a lower resting heart rate and improved HRV. I framed meditation as a habit I wanted to carry forward, not because it made life easier, but because it helped me meet my daily challenges with more steadiness.
January 2, 2025 – Splitting Meals
The second post was about my long, often frustrating relationship with food, especially with portion control. Diets never stuck for me, and intermittent fasting felt like a battle of willpower rather than a behavior change. Splitting meals with Rocky, something we started back in 2023, quietly rewired how much food felt like “enough.” By the start of 2025, I had lost meaningful weight, stayed under 185 pounds, and was aiming for 175 without tracking calories or feeling deprived. I wasn’t trying to eat less. I was trying to eat sanely, and this habit finally made that possible.
January 3, 2025 – Weight Training
The third post was an admission that I had avoided weight training most of my life. Walking, hiking, and running were familiar, but they never delivered the results I expected. Reading Peter Attia and seeing a DEXA scan forced me to confront visceral fat and muscle loss in a way I couldn’t ignore. I started lifting weights in mid-2024 and quickly saw fundamental changes in body composition and strength, along with something unexpected. I actually enjoyed it. By January 2025, weight training wasn’t a fitness experiment anymore. It was a habit I publicly committed to carrying forward.
Did My New Habits Survive?
Thankfully, I have mainly good news to report. While I can’t say each of them was a daily practice in 2025, I can report they are still habits. And that should make me happy, and it does, but not without some reservations.
Meditation
While I still meditate multiple times a week, and recognize the benefits when I do, the “daily” part of the practice fell off sometime mid-year in 2025. I’m not sure what caused this. Conflicting objectives, I suppose, is the only honest answer.
You see, I also tried to eliminate my tendency toward “all or nothing” behavior in 2025 and have been pretty successful at it. But that also means that when I decided to sleep in and missed a day, I didn’t beat myself up. I’d call my relationship with meditation a growing one. I’m pretty sure it will be even more consistent in 2026. And more meaningful.
Splitting Meals
Rocky and I still split meals. I don’t think this one will ever stop. My weight is up a bit, but not anywhere near the weight I’ve carried over the two decades. And I’m thankful to report that my new relationship with food has continued. Can I still do better? Of course.
My public commitment here is to do just that, but again, without beating myself up. I’m not chasing 175 lbs anymore. I want to feel good in my skin. I think this has become a more sustainable mindset.
Weight Lifting
This one has only ebbed and flowed in intensity, but not in consistency. I love weight lifting now. Seriously, I can’t understand why I waited so long. It’s the thing that complements the habit of splitting meals. When I’m lax on eating, the weight lifting helps. 2026 will bring more of the same, but perhaps with more consistency in intensity.
New Habits For 2026?
I think 2026 is going to be more about understanding the relationships among all my habits and being mindful of what I should focus on. After I wrote those three new habits posts last year, I wrote another titled “The Reach Of Our Habits: Building New Relationship Muscles.” In it, I talked about how I realized that habits don’t live in isolation but ripple out and shape parts of life I wasn’t actively managing, especially how I relate to people.
A conversation with my cousin Kim made it hit home that leaving social platforms like Facebook changed more than my screen time. It weakened the “relationship muscles” I used for direct connection because I hadn’t consciously replaced passive tech-mediated habits with more intentional ones.
I realized that breaking a habit isn’t just about shedding something negative, it’s about deciding what I want to be and building the behaviors that actually get me there, and that I needed to put effort into rebuilding those relationship muscles rather than assuming they’d grow back on their own.
So 2026 is going to be less about stacking on new habits and more about paying attention to the ripple effects of the ones I already have. I don’t want to win in one area by quietly leaking in another. If a habit gives me clarity but costs me connection, or discipline but shrinks my world, then it needs to be reworked, not celebrated.
The work in 2026 is to be more conscious. It’s to design and embrace habits that reinforce each other, not work in opposition, and to stay honest about what they’re actually producing in my life.
That feels less like optimization and more like stewardship. Here’s to stewardship.
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