37. Consistency Means Showing Up Even When Your Plan Falls Apart - One Pinky Surgery And My Perfect Routine Vanished

A tiny injury can expose a big truth: most of us don’t have a “strong routine”, we have a routine that only works when conditions are perfect. After breaking my pinky playing basketball and needing surgery, I’m recording from a cast and facing how quickly my workouts, energy, focus and even basic tasks can fall apart. The surprise wasn’t the limitation, it was the mindset spiral: feeling behind, fearing lost progress and slipping into all-or-nothing thinking.

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- Alita <3 

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This podcast is intended for general educational purposes only. The content discussed does not replace professional medical, nutritional, or fitness advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Individual needs and responses vary, especially with exercise and nutrition. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider before making significant lifestyle changes.

Transcript

Welcome And Why Wellness Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up? Welcome back to Vito with Alita. This is a podcast about evidence-based wellness for real life. I'm Alita and I'm here to talk about fitness, health, mindset, and building a strong and sustainable life. But doing so without extremes, guilt, or perfectionism. If you care about your health, but you also want a life that you can actually live, you're definitely in the right place. Now before we jump in, I just want to say thank you for being here. It genuinely means a lot that you choose to spend your time listening. And I don't take that lightly. If you've been enjoying the show, following the podcast really helps it grow and lets me know that you're enjoying what you're listening to. And it will actually help more people find these conversations, which means I can keep bringing you new episodes every single week. Alright, let's get into today's episode.

Breaking A Finger Breaks The Routine

SPEAKER_00 1:24

I'm Alita, and today today we're getting into Alita's life currently is that I was playing basketball and of course I broke my finger. And it's okay. It was just my little my pinky. But I actually had to get a little surgery for it to put some pins to rotate it back in place. It was a little bit of a mess. And that kind of sparked today's episode as I'm sitting here recording in a cast. A cast that has limited my motion and I the fingers on my right hand, which is my dominant hand, hand I used to write with. So even things like typing or whatever have it's been taking me a while because I'm typing with one hand and my left hand. And this kind of brings me into today. I used to think my routine was really solid. Like no matter what was going on in my life, I had this structure I could rely on. And I thought about this because no matter what kind of stage of my life I was in, whether I was working or I was in school or it was summer, winter, whatever it was, I thought that I had this structure, this routine I could rely on. But then I had this little surgery on my finger, and it completely threw everything off. And not in a huge dramatic way, like I'm fine, but just enough that I couldn't show up the way I normally would. And it made me realize something I honestly did not want to admit, and that my routine was not as stable as I thought.

Expugnable Habits And All Or Nothing

SPEAKER_00 3:08

It was actually expunable. Now I learned this word recently, expunable, E-X-P-U-G-N-A-B-L-E. And it basically means something that can be broken through or disrupted. So, aha, that's our word of the week. And when I heard of this word, or when I kind of saw it on my vocabulary ad, I immediately thought about routines because we like to believe that once we build habits, they're solid. Like they're just part of who we are, right? I always talk about identity, that's how you build habits. Habits are things you do automatically, you don't think about them, and that's what I always thought about them. That's what I thought about the way I was conducting my life. But in reality, most routines are a lot more fragile than we might think they are. And this might be maybe a naive episode. I'm somebody who is still very young, who has not had children, who has who still lives a very comfortable life. And some of you may already know this, but hey, I'm learning as we go. And after my surgery, I couldn't just go about my day the same way. You know, my workouts weren't the same. I have not even worked out in maybe two, three, not three, two weeks now since the break has actually happened. Even the smallest tasks felt off. Like I have not really used my left hand as much ever, right? So the first day of feeding myself with my left hand was a disaster. And obviously, my energy and my focus has shifted. I spend maybe most of my day laying down, which is a bit weird for me. And what surprised me was not just the physical limitation, it was how quickly I felt like I was falling off. Like, you know, oh my god, I'm not doing my full routine, and now I'm somehow behind, and I'm gonna be behind, and all the progress I made was lost. And I was having all these thoughts, even if I know they're technically not true. And I want to be honest about this. My mindset was very all or nothing, although I'm somebody who prides myself in having a balanced approach. But until it was tested, you know, that's when you really know if your mindset has been shifted or not. And I also believed that consistency meant doing the same things every single day, same routine, same intensity, no matter what. And if I couldn't do that, I felt like I was failing. But that's actually the mindset that makes most people quit. And this is not just a personal thing, this is actually something that shows up a lot in behavioral science. Habits are really tied to your environment and to your circumstances. And this is very important because we sometimes tend to take our environment and circumstances for granted, and we get so hard on ourselves when we're not able to follow through on a very on a certain routine that we might imagine for ourselves. So when something in your life changes, like your schedule, your energy, I don't know, your physical ability, something dramatic happens. Your habits just naturally get disrupted. And it's not that you maybe lack discipline, it's just that the system you built doesn't match your life anymore. You know, the habits you built under certain circumstances, those circumstances don't exist anymore to support the habit. And before I dive into this a little bit more, I do want to be very clear. This is not about lowering your standards or making excuses. I am a big, big believer in showing up, in discipline, and that hasn't changed here. What has changed is as you go through these different changes is how you should define showing up.

Redefining Showing Up Day To Day

SPEAKER_00 7:00

So, for example, here's where the little shift kind of comes in. Instead of asking, why can't I stick to my routine? So, Alita, why have you not been to the gym in two weeks? It's just a finger that has been broken. You can do leg exercises, right? But that's what I'm telling myself. But instead, I started asking, okay, what does showing up look like in this sort of version here of my life? Today, with an arm and a cast, what does showing up look like? And that question has allowed me to change the way I view things. It has kind of changed everything for me. Now, there were definitely days when I broke my finger, and now being after my surgery, where I could have just done nothing. I was even contemplating not recording a podcast. And honestly, it would have been easy to say, I'll just do it later. I'm not gonna do anything today. I broke my finger, I'm just gonna lay in bed all day. Which you should prioritize rest, and I have been prioritizing rest. But instead, while prioritizing rest, I also asked myself, okay, what can I do today reasonably? Taking into account the physical limitation, taking into account the pain I'm feeling, taking into account side effects of medications, all those things. And it was less. So today going on a walk with my dog was all I was able to do. And on a regular day, I guess you can say, that's only one part of the whole routine. But for today, that was all I was able to do. But I never did nothing, even if it was going up and down the stairs a few times, even just like at this point, unloading the dishwasher at some points became the something that I was holding on to. And I didn't stop being disciplined, I just changed what discipline looked like according to the circumstances. And I know that this is just a temporary thing, and that as my finger heals and I get back into what feels normal for me, I'll be able to go back to those routines that I built under those circumstances where I was feeling normal.

Seasons Of Life And Adaptive Discipline

SPEAKER_00 9:19

And this is where the idea of seasons really started making sense to me. I think we've all heard of the different seasons of life, the ebbs and the flows, the highs and the lows. Now I don't want to just talk about this in a cliche or vague way, but let's let's talk about it in a practical way. We have some seasons for pushing, some are just for maintaining, and some are for rebuilding. And here's the key different seasons don't actually remove discipline, they honestly just require a different version of it. And I think right now I'm in a rebuilding, I'm rebuilding a whole bone. Alright, so for me right now, my discipline is gonna look like I'm gonna wake up, do my normal skincare routine with one hand, and make sure I'm eating enough food because my appetite has not been up there with all the meds I've been taking. And that's for me what it looks like, making sure my dog is getting her walk. And if it's sunny enough, I'm gonna go outside, get some vitamin D to change the mood, and that's what my discipline has been looking like. Even doing things like we're just responding to emails in a timely manner because I know I'm able to in this moment, rather than letting it pile up. And part of this season is also just being understanding. For example, I wear an aura ring. The aura ring gives me a little grade, I guess you can call it, a little score for your sleep, for your readiness. Let me, when I tell you my sleep score last night was a 43, like that's just devastating. I just was not able to sleep. I was in pain, I was having insomnia. And as somebody who takes pride in prioritizing their sleep and getting a great sleep score, that 43 stung like hard. But I kind of chuckled at it and I just thought, you know what? That's just what am I gonna do, you know? And I took that as a sign to just take it way easy today, and that's what I did.

Lower The Bar Without Quitting

SPEAKER_00 11:24

So going back to our word of the week, expunable. At first, it might sound like I don't know, a weakness, like something that can be broken, but I urge us to see it a little bit differently. Your routines are supposed to be challenged. Life is going to interrupt you, change things, going to shift your capacity. And if your system could not adapt, then it doesn't survive. So, what actually helped me was lowering the barrier instead of completely quitting. So, shorter workouts, if any. If any, meaning for me that meant more like walking, lighter effort if I have to, focusing on showing up rather than doing everything perfectly. Just being consistent in what I can, because consistency is not about doing every single thing all the time, it's about not disappearing when things get hard, and keeping yourself accountable so that you are still showing up and that understanding and reminding yourself that honestly things will things will get better. So, yes, your routine might be exputable, life might interrupt it, challenge it, change it, but that doesn't mean you stop showing up. It means you find a way to keep on going anyway. Because discipline is not about your perfect conditions, it's about consistency in the imperfect ones. So if your routine feels a little off right now, you're not failing, you're not alone, talking to you from a person in a cast, your life just changed, and your habits need to change with it. The goal is never ever to build a perfect routine, it's to build one that can survive real life. And I hope that my little story is just a testament to that and a little reminder for you to do the same.

Final Reminder And Stay Connected

SPEAKER_00 13:23

Thank you for your beautiful ears, and I'll see you on the next one. Bye-bye. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I really appreciate you being here. If something in the episode clicked for you, send it to a friend. Or you can reach out to me directly using the link in the description. I genuinely love hearing from you. And if you want more evidence-based wellness, you can connect with me via my Instagram. Again, that link will be in the description below. Take care of yourself this week, and I'll talk to you soon. See you on the next one. Bye bye.