If you knew the secret to maintaining health, would you be interested? Let’s look at the top five reasons why healthy habits don’t stick, and more importantly, two changes you can make today to turn your health journey around!
1 Unrealistic Goals:
Setting overly ambitious or vague goals can lead to frustration.
2 Lack of Planning:
Without a clear plan or routine, it’s easy to fall back into old habits.
3 Immediate Gratification:
Many people seek quick results, and healthy habits often take time to show benefits.
4 Social Influences:
Peer pressure and social environments that promote unhealthy behaviours can undermine efforts to adopt healthy habits.
5 Failure to Track Progress:
Not monitoring progress can make it difficult to see the benefits of new habits.
Break and Create
Both breaking and creating habits are crucial to a new heathy lifestyle. A study by Wood & Neil, (2016) showed that chocolate lovers who decided to eat carrots instead of chocolate, continued to eat carrots even when chocolate was offered. Why? Our brains love habits and patterns! Deliberately breaking a pattern (stop chocolate), and creating a new one (eat carrots), and then repeating (eat carrots, eat carrots, eat carrots…) is the best way to reprogram the brain.
Let me explain using a recent client, Nancy (not her real name) who’s goal was to ‘walk more’ using the Break and Create model:
- Realistic Goals: First, we identified what to Break: Social media scrolling. Then what to Create: “Walk 30-minutes every day”.
- Planning: Nancy turned off notifications and deleted some time-wasting apps. Instead, her hat and runners, dog lead and poop bag were ready to go for a walk (and of course the dog is ready 24/7)!
- Gratification: She had to break the need for a ‘pat on the back’ with a future goal. Nancy created an online account to pop in $1 with each walk. She is keen to buy a new outfit for her healthy body.
- Social Influencer: At social gatherings, Nancy simply told people that she wanted to make healthy choices. She was able to impress a few friends who asked to go on walks with her regularly.
- Track Progress: Nancy’s walking will become part of her brain chemistry, but in the meantime, she uses a fitness tracking app to count steps.
Whether you start with carrots, walking, or a habit you have been trying repeatedly to introduce, the ‘Make and Create model’ is a game-changer for creating a new lifestyle.
Reference
Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2016). Healthy through Habit: Interventions for Initiating & Maintaining Health Behavior Change. Behavioral Science & Policy, 2(1), 71-83. https://doi.org/10.1177/237946151600200109
