Sustaining Healthy Habits

As we enter into a new year our motivation is high to improve our health and create better habits.  Let's try to better understand habits and how we can change them for the better.  

• What is a habit?
  It's an automatic response, that doesn't require much conscious effort.  A learned response that is maintained by some sort of reward or avoidance of a negative event.  It can be a behavior, thought, emotion or physiological response.  We have good and bad habits.  Bad habits or unhealthy habits create immediate benefit with long term harm.  A good habit or healthy habit leads to immediate and long term benefits (or health).  Unhealthy habits over time can lead to depression, obesity, chronic disease.


• How do habits form?
  Take a moment to notice how your can mindlessly perform a habit, like brushing your teeth or driving to work.  Habits are learned or maintained by some sort of reinforcement, whether it be positive or negative.  Changing unhealthy habits can often be difficult, that's why there's so much research and effort around ways to develop new habits.  Forming a new habit requires repeating a behavior until it becomes automatic with little conscious thought.


• Why Healthy Habits are difficult to sustain?
  Lapses in new healthy behaviors usually happen due to stress, distractions or fear.  It takes a lot of energy to sustain something new until it becomes a habit.  This is the normal formation of sustaining them.  For example, most of us are in a habit of brushing our teeth every night, although occasionally you miss a night.  Being that it is a long-term sustained habit, it's easy to pick up the next day and resume as usual without much thought or energy.  For habits that are not as solidified, as it might not considered a habit yet, the resumption of this behavior becomes more difficult.  This new behavior takes more energy and conscious thought to continue especially when something happens in your life that distracts you.


• How does one successfully establish a healthy habit?
  Overcoming bad habits and establishing good ones have been well researched over the years.  Read on for a few tips to successful change but don't fool yourself, it takes a great deal perseverance and effort to establish a new habit.  Journal your thoughts to better understand the good or bad, habit or behavior.  Ask yourself, what are the rewards, what are the consequences, does it progress you towards your long-term goal?  A common failure while working on new behaviors is to have an "all or nothing" thought process.  Either you're on the plan or not, there's no middle ground, this is strong predictor of failure.  We are all human and need to accept imperfection or the "gray areas."  Through the process of developing a healthy habit we will stray, accept that as part of the process.  Most importantly, will you let it derail your progress or will you get back on the path?  Similar to resuming your tooth brushing routine after missing a day, will you give up because a day is missed or can you recognize that behavior has long term benefits, whether or not a day, here and there is missed? Be open to understanding lapses - the straying from the path.  How bad was it, does it really mean you are incapable of change, or can you get back on track to repeat the healthy behaviors until they become the habit?  Lastly, consider using a health coach to assist you in setting small manageable goals and provide guidance, especially when your stray off the path that will ultimately lead to success in the long term.

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