Healthy Habits: Start Simple

Life is pretty complicated right now!

Suddenly out of routine, you might be struggling to maintain normal habits – healthy or otherwise. Your normal Get up–Work out–Healthy breakfast–Off to work routine now might be Cramming anything in your mouth and Not even thinking about exercise until you’re well into your work day. While being out of routine is frustrating, it’s also a golden opportunity. Create a new habit means changing an old one. With normal habits disrupted anyway, half the work is already done. Setting up new healthy habits just got easier.

So what is a habit?

Habits are automatic actions, a behavior that you’ve done so many times that you do it without any conscious thought. This is a win for your brain; It keeps you doing the basics without taking attention away from things you need to actively think about. An action is truly a habit when it’s done before you think about it. (Like those rather frightening times when you drive to work and arrive without realizing it.)

Healthy habits are automatic actions that support your health, fitness, and overall wellbeing.

A great way to create healthy habits:

Start simple.

Psychological research tells us splitting your effort (brainpower) among different tasks prevents you from doing any of them well. This is why multitasking isn’t great for mentally demanding tasks: Your brain never gets into enough of a groove to do meaningful work.

This concept applies to longer time frames too. If you’ve ever tried to change a habit, you know it takes a while. Sometimes a long while. When you split your effort across multiple new habits, it’s a recipe for… not failure, exactly, but backsliding. It is possible to create several new habits at once, but it takes a very long time. Your brain is busy trying to automate all the things! You’re more likely to give up than to achieve.  

What to do instead?

Pick one thing to focus on, and do it until you are doing it without thinking. Pick something that is maximum benefit for minimum effort, or the thing that will be easy to implement. It helps (a lot!) if your new habit is something interesting, exciting, fun, or will lead to an outcome that’s really meaningful to you.

By the way: There are lots of Health-Fitness-Wellness gurus out there that are happy to tell you exactly what your body needs. Contrary to all their “expert” advice, you are the expert in that area. A good coach just helps you figure it out!