Left leg first or right leg?

This post is about habits. Not the bad habits like smoking or drinking or risky sex, but the habits which we fall into so completely that we don't realise they are habits.

When you put your trousers on do you go left leg first or right leg first? I bet you don't even know. I certainly don't, but will check tomorrow morning. And I would be almost certain that whatever order I do it in has been the way I have done it for decades, perhaps for my entire life.

This habituation of routine actions should come as no surprise as we are organs of efficiency, and if our brains don't have to make choices, I'm sure they would prefer not to. Maybe that's why some of us vote the same way for our entire lives.

I was made to think about these habitual movements by the fact that I have just bought clip-in shoes and pedals for my bike. I did this because I am doing a sponsored bike ride in May for a myeloma charity. Did I mention the sponsor form?

This one : 

Sponsored bike ride

No pressure, of course. (That will come later)

But anyway, if you use clip in pedals you need to be ready to unclip if you have to stop at a junction, which you do by twisting your lowest foot outwards. This releases the clip and bingo, you can put your foot down. But I have always had my right foot lowest over the last 20 years of cycling, and now I have to undo that habit so that I don't fall off when I stop because of releasing the wrong foot. It is *really* hard to change such unconscious and 'grooved' behaviours.

So now I'm on a completely unnecessary (but hitherto private) mission to undo all these habits.

The first one I went at today is that I have always looked away when getting a blood test or injection. And I mean always. So I had never seen a needle piercing my skin until today, and today I've seen three. And it did not make it any worse at all. And the picture at the top is, as you may now have guessed, all 12 samples that I watched being extracted today.

Do what habits to do next? Milk before or after the tea in the mug? Perhaps, but that has moral principles behind it rather than mere habit. How about left shoe/ right shoe or maybe the hand I wave with? Or just trouser legs? 

I'll start tomorrow with trouser legs.