TOP 5 HABIT-CHANGE HELPERS
Implementing new habits to achieve better health can be daunting, here are my top 5 ways to help ease the growing pains and increase your persistence to achieve your goal!
SIMPLIFY and PRIORITIZE
We live in an increasingly busy and distracting world. With so many people and gadgets vying for our attention, sometimes its helpful just to sit back and take account of them all and ask yourself “is this REALLY important in advancing my life and does it deserve my already fleeting attention?” More times than not you’ll find the answer to be no. Reading twitter arguments, checking work emails every hour on a Saturday or ruminating on that snide comment a co-worker said may feel important in the moment but are often distractions from other tasks we should be enjoying or committing time and attention to. Busyness does not equal productiveness unless you are busy doing the things that are critical toward getting you where you want to go, so try to reduce or cut out as many time and energy-sucking distractions that are keeping you from your goal.
PREPARE
“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail”. You’ve no doubt heard this statement, and I realize that it’s very cliche but it got to be that way for a good reason, it’s incredibly true. Preparation doesn’t just include actions like meal prepping, not going to the grocery store hungry, or setting out your gym clothes the night before you’ll need them. Mental preparation is another important variable in how well you can execute on your habits. Take some time and ponder all the mental hurdles and obstacles that you may face and how you can overcome them. It may even be helpful to write down a few “if - then” statements regarding such obstacles (eg. IF this situation occurs, THEN I will respond in this way.) Visualization and mental preparation give you the opportunity to play out a situation that hasn’t happened yet so that if or when it does, you’ll know exactly how you want to respond.
START SMALL
Make your new health habits small enough to be sustainable over the long term, and long term is at least 6 months. Losing half a pound per week of bodyweight for a year is more productive than losing 20 pounds in a month and then quitting and regaining it all because it wasn’t sustainable. If you can’t commit to an hour in the gym every day, how about 30 minutes? Still too much, how about taking a 10 minute walk after every meal? In habit building, consistency is more important than intensity by great orders of magnitude. Another thing to remember, there is nothing stopping you from doing a bit more if you feel like it on a particular day, if your new goal is to eat 2 servings of vegetables a day but you feel like eating 3, go for it, you’ve met your goal and then some! Better to move slowly toward your goal over a long period of time than not move at all, or worse, move backward.
BE ACCOUNTABLE
Accountability is a game-changer for many people. Some (often highly ambitious and successful) people become extremely accountable to themselves and feel deep guilt when they don’t complete the tasks they told themselves they would do. Others, such as myself and the majority of people, I suspect, have become somewhat desensitized to keeping our word to ourselves and need an external source of accountability to answer to, at least at the start. So if you’re sick of breaking promises to yourself and pushing back the things you say you’re going to do, you can either make a firm commitment not to break those promises you made, or find an accountability-buddy, mentor or coach.
KNOW the WHY
Friedrich Nietzsche said “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Simon Sinek said “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”
The sentiment shared between these two quotes is that, if you have a WHY, a deeply sewn emotional or spiritual reason for doing something, you stand a much better chance of accomplishing any goal in the face of adversity. Think about your goals and reasons for creating habit change. Are they deep enough that you feel them in your soul, and you feel compelled to accomplish them by any means necessary? Or are they simply surface-level, superficial reasons that will crumble under the weight of excuses and the tiniest of obstacles? Do some introspection and ask yourself this question “Why do I REALLY want to make this change?”