We know that deciding to make healthy choices can assist us with feeling better as well as living longer. Perhaps you’ve already tried to eat better, get more exercise or sleep, stop smoking, or reduce stress. It’s absolutely not easy. However, research shows how you are able to boost your ability to create – as well as sustain – a healthy lifestyle.
Behavioural scientists who study habit formation are of the feeling that great deal of us try to create healthy habits in the wrong way. We make bold resolutions in order to start exercising or lose weight, for instance, without taking the steps which are needed in order to set ourselves up for success.
Why It’s So Difficult
Before we do ANYTHING with actually building healthy habits, you need a very good reason about why you want to establish them in the first place. If you don’t, the behavioural changes will never stick.
All of this “change who I am” stuff needs to be at the centre of your decision-making moving forward. In addition, if you don’t have a good reason for why you’re doing it, you’re dead in the water.
If you’re here as you have made the decision that you “should” get in shape, you’re going to fail the very minute that life gets busy. If you are leopard crawling yourself to the gym as you think that you “should” run on a treadmill five days every single week even though you hate it, you’re screwed!
Start Small
Big behaviour changes necessitate a high level of motivation which often can’t be sustained. Start with tiny habits to make the new healthy habit as easy as possible in the beginning. Taking a daily short walk, for instance, could be the beginning of a healthy exercise habit. Alternatively, putting an apple in your bag every day could lead to better and healthier eating habits.
Do It Every Day
Researchers have studied how people form healthy habits in the real world, asking participants to select a simple habit that they wanted to form, such as drinking water at lunch or taking a walk before dinner. It was shown that the amount of time it took for the task to turn out to be automatic — a habit — ranged from 18 to 254 days. The average time was 66 days!
The lesson here that you need to learn is that habits take a long time to create, however they form faster as opposed to when we do them more often. This means that you need to start with something sensible which is really easy to do.
It is more likely that you will stick with an exercise habit if you do some small exercise — jumping jacks, a yoga asana, a brisk walk — every day, as opposed than attempting to get to the gym three days a week. Once the daily exercise becomes a habit, you can explore new, more intense forms of exercise.
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