Building Healthy Habits

Welcome back, I hope you are enjoying the posts so far, and at the very least, finding some small wins throughout your day!

As I touched on in the last article covering training, building healthy habits is the key the chasing those wins. As habits are performed mostly subconsciously, they don't take much thought. This is also the reason they can be really difficult to break, you can't really perceive that you are doing them unless you consciously think about it. This is part of the psychology behind human behaviour.

Habit building is, in essence, one of the most important aspects of behavioural change. Once you master the ability to adapt these changes to your everyday life, you will notice that when you give the habits a meaningful connection, for example, quitting smoking to live longer for your family, the outcome becomes much more clear. By this, I refer to the physical changes you will experience given sufficient time without smoking a cigarette.

As your goal is driven by a purpose, Ie instead of "quitting because it's bad", you are "quitting to have a healthier, happier and longer life with family", the habits will form much quicker, and be more sustainable because they are attached to, and anchored by strong emotions. In addition to making small changes initially to create sustainable habits, anchor them with a strong purpose.

This has the potential to backfire, however. Should the emotions connecting the habit be sufficient, and you revert back to bad habits, the relapse can be immense and often a crushing blow to self esteem and continued development. One of the best ways to combat this, should the relapse be inevitable, is to keep a journal or a friend to keep you accountable to your actions.

A journal is a helpful tool to assist anyone in forming a better habit building system. Keeping track of your day to day activities, you can identify where and when the changes can be made, and to how great an extent. This also helps you track your progress over the days, weeks, months and even years, to see how much your daily routine has changed through making small and simple habitual changes.

Be vocal with your circle of influence, and they should have no issue with supporting whatever it is that you need. There should be no hesitation in sharing successes or slip-ups to someone who can help to put you back on track. It might be difficult to confide in someone else regarding your personal journey, hence why a journal is definitely a suitable alternative.

Remember, the aim of the game is to take small steps. People so often get caught up in the process because they thought the best way was to take big leaps instead of small steps, and as I touched on previously, this can be too overwhelming to be sustainable. The same process is recommended with altering habits. Modify behaviours, don't stop them completely, build up to that if it suits your specific goals.

The system we currently live in makes it incredibly difficult to maintain healthy habits, in some ways, it preys on the people's lack of inhibitions to sustain unhealthy industries, the fast food industry is a prime example of this. The use convenience and pricing to undercut the healthy options, making it seem to be the smarter option. At face value, it isn't hard to understand why we have been conditioned to this system.

I will dive deeper into this topic in the next post, but for now, just remember that the results will NOT come for free, they require consistent dedication and a solid foundation as to WHY you are doing what you are doing. It doesn't have to be complicated, it just needs to be adhered to.

Until next time,

D.