HEALTHY HABITS
This is a term I use to describe daily practices in your life that make you feel amazing physically, mentally, and align with who you truly are.
These will vary person to person, however, I truly believe from a scientific and evidence based background that proper sleep, adequate movement, and food should all be top priorities for everyone looking to achieve a balanced lifestyle. Your day to day practices will change and that's okay. Your journey is not linear, you will make changes to your life which will shake up your priorities but the bottom line is to do things that make you happy everyday. If ending your day with a journal entry makes you happy, add it to your healthy habits list. If reading every morning, or working out, or cooking an awesome meal for your family makes you happy then make sure to acknowledge it and try to incorporate that into your day to day routine.
Creating healthy habits is a lot easier than you might think. Let’s discuss a little bit on how habits are formed as I believe it will help you to understand, create and successfully develop new habits. Our brains convert sequences of actions into automatic routines (called chunking) and this is the basics of how habits form. Our brains are constantly looking to find an easier way to expend less energy and to become more efficient. Our brain does this by creating habits which allows us to stop constantly thinking about basic behaviours such as walking, talking, what to eat, how we eat etc. This allows us to have the mental capacity to think of extraordinary creations, scientific theories, developments, our bff’s boyfriend drama all while doing a basic task like walking.
Our brain develops habits with a 3 step loop - a cue, a routine, a reward. This is the important part, identifying your own cues, routine, and rewards for habits you want to form and habits you want to get rid of. Let’s use the example of eating when you’re bored, and you want to transform that bad habit into adding more physical activity to your day. The cue would be you have nothing planned or scheduled in, your mind-frame of your present situation is that you are bored. The routine would be you pull out your phone and scroll endlessly and decide you need a snack to go along with the boredom. The reward is a snack which fuels your cravings and ultimately distraction from thoughts. Now that you have identified what your cue is, you need to look at what you are getting from your reward. If your reward is distraction then you need to decide what routine can replace the bored snacking but still give you the reward.
Habit reformation is all about replacing the routine. If you know that after work you get bored before dinner, create a new routine for distraction and plan to do some physical activity. Plan out exactly what workout you will do, at exactly what time, how long it will take you, etc. The more specific you can make this, the easier it will be for you to implement. Tons of studies show that the effort put forth to plan for routine change, and to anticipate any barriers along the way is key to being successful. If you know that you often feel like you don’t have time for a workout after work/before dinner, make a plan to get over that hurdle. Identify your hurdles, anticipate them so you can defeat them.
I highly encourage you to read “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, it goes way more in depth on the subject using numerous examples to express the positive correlation habit change has on your overall life.
A great starting point would be my free eBook: 4 Week Guide to Staying Healthy at Home.
