Everyone is a creature of habit, and the combination of your habits are reflected in what you do on a day to day basis.
What you do on a day to day basis gives you your results. If your bad habits outweigh your good ones your health is suffering.
Why Habit Change Is Difficult
In a nutshell it’s because the human mind resists change – this is normal and we’re all up against it.
Basically we like what’s familiar, and dislike the unfamiliar and will turn away from it.
Trying to do the unfamiliar usually leads to a 180 degree reversal, going straight back to unhealthy behaviour. But you can change this scenario by understanding a bit more about how your mind works, and setting yourself up a bit better in the first place.
You can become a creature of habit who does healthy things rather than unhealthy things with a little forethought.
One Change At A Time
You can make this easy on yourself by changing one thing at a time, rather than attempting sweeping changes all in one go.
This is an easy change I made to give you an example.
When I realised I could easily do a regular 14 hour fast (a VERY healthy habit – read about it here) by simply dropping the sugar in my morning coffee I decided it was time to finally do this.
“But I don’t like my coffee without sugar” my mind would tell me.
My mind likes what’s familiar, so obviously it’s going to kick up a bit of fuss initially about this awful change. But I’m ready for this because I know it’s coming, it’s normal.
One way I use to get around my own nonsense is to say “I’m going to experiment with this for 2 weeks only, and if I want to go back to sugar in my coffee at that point I will”.
So basically I’m not making any big lifelong commitment here, so my mind can give it rest because this is just a short term experiment and no threat to the status quo.
Here’s the interesting thing. Drinking my coffee without sugar very quickly becomes familiar to me. After only 3-4 days I was actually enjoying the new taste. I could taste the flavours and subtitles of the coffee without it being masked by sugar.
The more familiar I’m becoming with coffee minus the sugar, the more unfamiliar I was becoming with sweet coffee. The thought of drinking coffee with sugar was becoming horrible!
A Healthy Creature Of Habit
Imagine if you did something small like this every 2 weeks.
Within 12 months you would have taken on 26 new healthy habits. That adds up to a lot of change and potentially makes you a healthy creature of habit.
Often people set themselves up for failure by trying to change too many things all at the same time.
If this is you why not try something with a better success rate:
- Pick a new habit you’d like to create
- Commit to 2 weeks only of doing this new thing everyday
- Notice how you’ve changed withing those 2 weeks
- Pick your next thing!
Our habits make or break our health, which is why I’ll be focusing on them on my retreat in May.
Are you coming? Click here for more details.
The early bird offer is still available for a short time and I’d love to see you there!
Warm wishes
Dr Julie
Come and join me here in May 🙂
If you’re interested in finding out more about habits this is a great book:
