Making Habits Stick
November 9, 2022 | Words by Gabe Yanez
Aim High With Your Goals, Aim Low With Your Habits
We’ve gone over many different topics over the past couple of months, tackling everything from how to curb late-night snacking to why you should spend less time staring at your phone. If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you now have a lot of information and things to work on.
The question now becomes “How do you implement these healthy habits so they stick?”
Prioritize, Aim Low, & Build
When it comes to turning behaviors into habits, there are a lot of resources, tactics, and advice out there that you can lean on for help. While there’s no right or wrong answer, here are some helpful tips that should make habit-building a little easier now that you’ve accumulated all this information over the past seven weeks.
Prioritize. This one is pretty simple. If you try to work on everything at once, the likelihood of all those habits sticking is very low. The best thing to do is to look back at the healthy habits we’ve discussed and prioritize. What areas of your life can use the most work? What are some of the healthy habits that can have the most significant impact on your health and fitness journey? Is it nutrition? Is it cooling down after your workouts? Or is it spending less time on your phone? Pick one or two priorities to work on and start there.
Aim Low. This one might seem a little strange — shouldn’t you aim high and work towards a goal that challenges you to get outside your comfort zone? Sure, you should aim high when you set goals, but when it comes to building habits, it can sometimes be beneficial to aim low. Find a habit that looks pretty doable and commit to that. Maybe you’re working on your nutrition, so aiming low means adding a serving of vegetables to a single meal every day for an entire month.
That might seem like a very manageable change, which is the point. Aim low and pick a habit that’s so easy it feels easily attainable. Stick to that for 4-6 weeks, then build on where you started and make your behavior change a little more challenging. Sometimes aiming too high when trying to change your behavior is why you fizzle out and end up right back where you started. Small wins might not be as good as big wins, but they are better than no wins at all.
Build. Once you get a few easy behavior changes turned into habits, you can start to habit stack and build momentum towards significant and positive changes. The secret to getting to this step is the two steps above. First, you need to prioritize and pick the one or two things you will focus on. Next, you aim low and start collecting easy wins that hardly feel like a challenge. That’s when you start to gradually turn the knob and level up the behavior changes you are working on.
Before you know it, you’ll have built a bunch of sustainable habits that work towards getting you closer to all your health, fitness, and nutrition goals!?
One Thing to Try This Week: Put Pen to Paper
Put pen to paper on your plan to prioritize, aim low, and build.
What are you going to work on first? Will you start working on that habit now, or will you put it off until the beginning of the year?
How can you set a goal that feels so easy you know you’ll stick to it?
Use those questions to help you get started on a plan and make sure to reference our past healthy habits blog posts to help you pick what it is you want to work on!
