WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT HABITS AND FOCUS FROM MY KITTY CAT

Post author:Rebecca H. Lee
Post published:July 18, 2024
Post category:Creativity / Freelancers / Life Hacks

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Every morning I get up at the same time. I press the snooze alarm once, and a few minutes later, I hear it again. I reluctantly get up and do my morning rituals. At night I also have a ritual. Before bed, I lay down on a giant bean bag chair and relax for 20 minutes without looking at a screen. I’ve kept these habits up for over a year. Not because I’m well disciplined, but because of my cat.

My kitty cat is literally a creature of habit. If I oversleep, he’ll harass me until I get up. If I stay on my computer too late, he bites me until I get off the couch and do what I’m supposed to do. I didn’t train him to do these things, not really. I guess we kind of trained each other, but he does a better job of keeping his habits than I do. Animals are better at following their instincts and less likely to get distracted by going down a Youtube rabbit hole. (And since he’s an indoor cat, no chance of going down a literal rabbit hole). He’s more in tune with his body and his circadian rhythms than I am. We have a robot that feeds him five times per day, and even though he doesn’t wear a watch, he can tell time by how he feels. Exactly two minutes before the feeding times, he runs to the food robot and stares at it. To be fare, he also does this whenever someone walks into a nearby room. He knows who controls the robot. But there is a level of focus when he knows it’s food time that he doesn’t have when he is merely optimistic. I often try to get him to run around and chase something just before food o’clock, (a favorite hobby most of the time) but not even a laser pointer is enough to break his focus during these two minutes. He knows that feeding time waits for nobody, and if he doesn’t consume every piece of kibble a split second after it hits the bowl, he has not achieved his peak indoor cat performance.

After ten PMzees and a quick lick bath, his craving for oxytocin hits him like a ton of bricks, and if I’m not on the bean bag in snuggle ready position, he just doesn’t feel right. He may act out by biting my feet, shoving objects off the counters, or just wandering around meow-whining.

Professor Meowsworth doesn’t set New Years Resolutions. He doesn’t have career goals. He just has set habits that get more and more reinforced the longer he keeps them up.