Good habits are hard to make and easy to break, but bad habits feel like an everyday temptation. For that reason, deciding to have healthier habits will keep your overall well-being, while neglecting your health can have devastating consequences.
What are healthy habits?
If you’re trying to improve your shape, feel better, or bring balance to your life, you might need to start with changing up your habits. Getting healthy requires taking some positive steps in new directions every day. Your long-term outlook can be summed up with a healthy today and healthier tomorrow. You don’t have to overhaul everything about your life; simply focusing on building small changes that can slowly help create positive habits overall are often easier than trying to do everything at once.
How are habits formed?
Research shows that our habits are formed through repetition [often, lots of repetition]. Therefore, if you aim to change your habits, you need to form new ones first.
According to research of The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, it takes 30 days of doing something every day before it becomes habitual.
If that seems like a long time, consider how hard it is to create a new habit in adulthood—and realize how difficult breaking an old one will be. But if your goal is worth achieving, then you’ll make it happen sooner than later with dedication, commitment, and discipline.
The 4 steps to setting yourself up for success:
1) Set realistic goals
Setting realistic goals is important, especially if you’re trying to stick to healthy habits. If you have a massive goal that you can’t wrap your head around, such as losing 50 pounds in a few months, it can be something unattainable or it will probably have a toll on your health.
By making small, achievable goals, like drinking more water or increasing your weekly exercise routine, you stand a much better chance of success.
This concept might seem obvious, but it helps you to look at these habits as life choices rather than temporary obligations.
Primarily, write down your intentions and set down your milestones.Based on that information, create a list of healthy habits that you'll need to achieve these marks, and end goals later down the road.
2) Set up cues throughout the day
If you really want to change your habits, it’s important to set up cues throughout your day. These cues will help you remember what you're trying to achieve.
In order to eat cleaner, make sure there are always fresh vegetables in your fridge.
If you want to take 30 minutes every morning walk, put your tennis shoes and exercise gear close to your bed so that you can’t miss it when it’s time.
When healthy eating is hard for you after work because of stress or boredom (two common barriers), find things that require less thinking and more movement, like cleaning up or folding laundry.
Set up phone notifications to remind you when it's time to drink water or exercise.
Leave your gym bag by the door so you can grab it easily
All these things will make your habit building activities easier!
3) Sort out your environment
By moving unhealthy snacks, like candy bars or chips out of sight (or even better, out of your house), you’ll be less likely to indulge.
Not being able to stick with an exercise plan because your gym membership lapsed is another example.
You don’t have to go cold turkey on bad habits, but get them out of where you sleep, work, play and relax so they become harder to access in moments of weakness.
These are just some examples, it's important that you look at your overall environment and consider the things that could contribute to hardship and change them!
4) Look for guidance
If you're a beginner or a person who needs some specific help and guidance in how to change your habits and improve your well-being, don’t hesitate to search for help.
Many times, when we set new goals or resolutions, our excess of motivation and lack of knowledge can be harmful to the goals we have projected.
If you want to improve your wellness by exercising more and having a better nourishment of your body for example, the option to have a trainer would make more sense, once a professional can analyze your goals, understand your individuality, and set safe and more efficient strategies than if you were doing it by yourself.
Healthy habits led by the right choice
4REAL believes that having professional direction is a great investment to align your life with your goals and your physical wellbeing is the foundation to have healthy habits and experience long-term wellness in life.
If you're interested in transforming your health thorough exercising but needs help to find a way to become your best-self, work now with a specialist personal trainer!
4REAL counts with Gold Standard professionals to deliver you a personalized support and guidance to your wellness journey. Click here to find more information about our plans.
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