Local Man Defends Habit on Grounds That He Has Survived It This Long
- Begin Within
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
MUNCIE, INDIANA —
Roger Tannehill, 58, offered a spirited defense of his nightly routine this week, pointing to the fact that he is, by his own account, "still standing."
"I've been doing this for thirty years," said Tannehill, referring to a pattern of staying up past midnight, skipping breakfast, and reaching for whatever's nearest whenever he feels stressed. "If it were really gonna get me, don't you think it would've gotten me by now?"
Tannehill, who could not recall the last time he felt genuinely rested, presented his longevity as the centerpiece of his argument. "People act like I'm doing something dangerous. I'm right here. I'm talking to you. Case closed."
He acknowledged a few recent developments — a creakiness getting off the couch, a habit of forgetting why he walked into rooms, an afternoon energy crash he's started scheduling his day around — but declined to connect any of them to the routine he has, in his words, "perfected."
"That's just getting older," he said. "Everybody slows down. You can't blame your whole life on staying up to watch the back half of a movie."
Asked whether he'd ever consider changing course, Tannehill said he would absolutely reconsider the moment something actually went wrong. "Soon as I get a real wake-up call, I'm on it," he said. "Day one. You'll see a different guy." He was unable to specify what such a wake-up call would look like, or how he would distinguish it from the signals he is currently ignoring.
A neighbor, who asked not to be named, agreed Tannehill was overthinking it. "Honestly, who has the energy to overhaul everything?" she said, eating cereal standing over the sink at 11:50 p.m. "You do what you can. Anyway, I gotta get up early."
At press time, Tannehill was citing the continued functioning of his body as evidence that his body was functioning.
Roger Tannehill is fictional. The habit of treating "I haven't paid for it yet" as proof you never will might be yours.
Tannehill is sure he's fine because nothing's broken yet. The science below is about everything that's quietly eroding while he waits for proof.
The "Use It or Lose It" Rule Nobody Warns You About
We love "use it or lose it" in the fitness world. We say it about muscle, about flexibility, about that one stretch you could do in your thirties and absolutely cannot now. But the phrase is bigger than your biceps — and it runs in a direction almost nobody talks about.
Your Body Is a Ruthless Budget Committee
Your body and brain are adaptive systems. They respond to demand. Whatever you use regularly, your body invests in — it diverts resources toward keeping it around. And whatever you stop using, the process reverses, and those resources get shipped off somewhere else.
Muscle is the obvious example. Research on muscle disuse — from bed rest, injury, or just a sedentary lifestyle — shows measurable atrophy can begin within days. Not weeks. Not months. Days. The body doesn't hold onto what it doesn't deem necessary, because keeping muscle around is expensive. If you're not using it, the body breaks it down and spends that energy elsewhere.
The same rule governs cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, neural pathways, skills, and sleep patterns. Pathways you stop using get pruned. Skills you stop practicing get rusty. None of it announces itself on the way out.
The Part Roger Missed: It Works on Bad Habits Too
Here's the half of the phrase that traps people like our friend in Muncie. Every time you run a habit — good or bad — you make it easier to run again.
The habit of staying up past a healthy bedtime gets stronger every night you let it run. The habit of skipping breakfast and walking out the door with no plan gets easier every single time, until you stop noticing it and it just becomes "normal."
"Use it or lose it" doesn't discriminate. It will happily strengthen the patterns quietly costing you — and the reason that's so hard to catch is exactly Roger's reasoning. The damage doesn't show up the same day. So you conclude there's no damage.
How Do I Stop Bad Habits From Getting Stronger?
The good news buried in all this: bad habits aren't powered by magic. They're powered by repetition. So the answer to how do I stop bad habits from getting stronger is almost insultingly simple — you stop running the rep. You don't fight the habit. You just decline to practice it, and every time you decline, it gets a little weaker.
Here's where I'd start, using a few of the patterns worth losing:
Stop staying up past your bedtime. Find the time you need to wake up and back off eight hours — that's your bedtime. Most people have a natural wind-down window and blow right past it because of one more episode. Honoring your real bedtime even one or two nights a week starts weakening the old pattern.
Stop leaving home without a food plan. Walking out the door with no idea what you'll eat is an active habit, practiced into a default — and it leads to reactive eating: fast food, vending machines, or going so long without eating that you're too hungry to choose well. The fix costs about two minutes of thinking through your day before you leave.
Stop using food as your primary stress response. The more you reach for food when you're anxious, bored, or frustrated, the more your brain wires stress straight to appetite. Break the loop by doing something else first — walk, journal, water, a few breaths, a phone call. It won't feel as satisfying at first, and that's actually how you know it's working.
Stop the all-or-nothing thinking. "I already blew lunch, so the day's ruined." "Missed Monday, I'll start over next month." Every time you run that pattern, you reinforce it. Practice the opposite: come back imperfectly, mid-day, on a Tuesday, no guilt spiral. Small returns beat perfect restarts.
Stop waiting for motivation. This is Roger's "soon as I get a real wake-up call" in a different outfit. Motivation isn't a prerequisite for action — it's usually the result of it. Do the smallest thing imaginable, and motivation tends to show up after you've already started.
The One Question That Makes It Stick
You don't need to overhaul your whole life this week. You need one question, asked every morning: What am I going to use today so that I don't lose it? Pick one thing. Follow through. Notice what's quietly slipping and choose to use it instead.
Roger's mistake isn't that he has bad habits — we all do. It's that he's waiting for a catastrophe to give him permission to change, while the slow erosion he can't see keeps adding up. You don't have to wait for the wake-up call. You get to decide, every single day, what gets stronger and what gets to fade.
Want a simple, no-overwhelm way to start using the habits worth keeping? Grab my free 7-day program at beginwithin.fit/7day
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