There’s nothing more cliché than announcing that last year was a rough year. But let’s be honest. Last year was a rough year.
I don’t want to speak for anyone, but I know when things get stressful, I tend to lose the thread and stop taking good care of myself. And to lead into another cliché, New Year’s is a great time to find that thread again and to get yourself back on track.
In-spite of whatever 2022 is going to look like, there’s hope that your personal year can still be great, and that starts with making choices that lead to you having healthy habits. And to finally dodge a cliché, I’m not just talking about healthy habits when it comes to diet and exercise!
Identify Bad Habits and Threats
One of the first steps to right yourself and start making better choices is to identify bad habits and the things that cause you to “spiral” into making poor choices.
Not to get too personal, but some examples from my own life are: eating junk food, binge watching movies/shows instead of reading or exercising because I’m “too stressed,” and staying up way too late doing nothing productive and then having a rough start to the next day. Classic.
By identifying these habits, you can start to look at the “threats” that cause you to make these choices and cut those out of your life. For example, if I keep eating an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting, one way I can curtail that is to just stop buying pints of ice cream. I know that sounds kind of simple, but hey, it works. Additionally, a good way to make sure I’m tired earlier and to stop stress in its tracks is to exercise and read! So, by incorporating those things into my schedule, I’ll directly confront the stress and the staying up too late at the same time.
You can even go a step deeper and start looking closer at the mindset you’re in when you’re making choices you’ll regret. What’s happening just prior to you making a poor choice? Is there a way to keep that from happening? If stress is the main cause and the stressor is something you can’t really avoid, what are ways you can relieve that tension? We’ll go into more detail on this in a bit.
There are always things that don’t really have a purpose. For example, you might binge eat mindlessly. You can’t really find a root cause for your disassociation on your own, but a good solution is to pre-portion your junk food in a separate bowl so you can only have so much.
Replace Bad Habits with Good Ones
Once you have the habits you want out of your life identified, you’ll need to fill that deficit with healthier choices. If you normally spend two-hours watching TV at night and you decide to cut that cold turkey, you better have something planned for that two-hour window or you’re bound to relapse. This is equally as true if you’re trying to eat healthier, you need calories to live, they just need to come from healthier sources, because if you starve yourself, you’re likely to overeat.
This isn’t necessarily me saying “be busy,” it’s more so me saying set yourself up for success. You can have healthy idle time: reading, walking, or any other hobby is a great way to make sure you’re able to stay on track.
If your bad habits are more “spur of the moment,” then this is doubly true. I find myself falling into social media rabbit holes where I’m just watching an endless stream of videos without stopping and it leads to me feeling like I wasted hours of my life! For me, it’s honestly hard to even notice that I’m falling into that routine sometimes, I’ll look up and realize I wasted most of my afternoon scrolling through YouTube.
These sneakier routines require you to be creative. You can put sticky notes or other reminders near your bad habit reminding you to do something healthier. If you’re trying to read more, you can keep a book on top of your laptop, at your computer desk, or on your coffee table. If you’re trying to stop snacking, you can put healthier options in front of your snacks in the pantry/fridge. If you’re trying to exercise more, maybe put your running shoes somewhere visible, or lay out your exercise clothes in the morning to be sure you make it to the gym.
This sort of stuff is necessary to break the habit and might not be necessary later once you’re in the routine of making better choices, so if your spouse/roommate complains about your stinky shoes in the living room, tell them it’s temporary… and then clean your shoes, really, it’s not that hard.
Dealing with Bad Mindsets
Now, if you’ve read all of that and have decided that stuff won’t work for you and are about to resign yourself to a lifetime of bad habits, then it might be important to take a step back and look at where your minds at.
When I’m in the dumps, it’s incredibly difficult to motivate myself to make better choices or to even feel like I’m able to make good choices, but your environment might be more at fault than you think. Studies show that a person’s mood is often reflective of the space around them, so, what’s your space like? If it’s messy, tidy up. It’ll take 5-15 minutes and is an easy way to get the ball rolling in terms of motivation. Are there other things in your life keeping you down? How can you fix them? If you’re truly tired of bad habits, you need to do everything you can to put yourself in a space to make better ones. If you’re in this place, then you probably have something already in mind that needs addressing. Be smart, safe, and honest, and you’ll do fine.
Establish a Routine
It’s commonly believed that it takes 21 days to break or form a habit. Anyone who got a gym membership and stopped going after a month knows that that’s not true. In fact, it can take anywhere between 18 to 254 days for the brain to establish “habitual” neural pathways. The reason there’s a huge disparity here is because people are complex and not all habits are as rewarding as others.
Endorphins play a huge role in how “sticky” a habit is. If something generates a reinforcer (e.g., dopamine, money, or comfort) then your brain will crave that behavior. The story of Pavlov and his dogs has been taught and retaught extensively, so we won’t get into it here, but establishing habits is basically self-operant conditioning.
That doesn’t mean you should reward yourself after reading 30 pages with some candy, what it does mean is that you’re going to have to work hard to see the benefits of what you’re doing, and you need to keep in mind that it might take some time before you can stop giving yourself pump-up talks in the gym parking lot.
Maintaining a Routine
Consistency is really the only way to maintain a routine. Which is self-explanatory. But really, that’s the only way to make sure you’re going to stick to something. In order to create consistency, you can track your progress, talk about your routines with friends and family (just make sure you’re telling people who want to hear about it, I still don’t want to hear about CrossFit), and, if possible, share your routine with someone else! Having an accountability buddy is a great way to make sure you’re not wasting the $30 a month on your gym membership.
Now, here’s where the soapbox has to go away, and we have to have some real talk. There’s no way to know what life’s going to throw at you, meaning there’s no way for sure you will be able to maintain a routine forever. Knowing that is important. If you’re able to establish a routine once, you’re likely going to be able to establish it again, it just might be harder.
The biggest thing that destroys routine is change. That sounds obvious, but you’ll need to accept that if you want to have any hope of continuing a routine when change comes knocking at your door. Hopefully, you’re able to start prioritizing before major changes happen. Just ask yourself: what habits do you value most and how can you maintain them in this new world? If it doesn’t seem possible to keep everything together, then you can always come back to something later.
You also should acknowledge that change can be good. Disrupting your routines is sort of its own reward. You’ll be able to really look at what you value and how much that routine has done for you up until now.
Any change, good or bad, will probably lead to stress and that’s normal. It’s also normal to form bad habits to deal with that stress. It’s important to keep that in mind and find good habits that relieve stress too, so the bad habit doesn’t stick around.
I realize this was a pretty clinical way to look at life, but sometimes that’s necessary to make changes. Even if you’re not the type to set resolutions, you should always take some time out of your life and look at your habits and evaluate them.