Ever wanted to stop smoking, eating healthier or exercising more but it didn’t last very long? We all have been there and I will tell you why it didn’t stick.
Old patterns and habits are stubborn. We feel powerlessness in front of that chocolate cookie, glass of wine or cigarette. These habits have been with us for our entire lives, so no wonder it was difficult to change but there is hope.
Habits refer to routine sequences of behaviours that have become automatic in response to specific cues in the environment. Habits are connections between cues in the environment and routine behaviours. For example, consider someone who drinks water with lunch. Having lunch in a specific location is the environmental cue; drinking water is the routine sequence of actions. The more the individual drinks water at the same location when eating lunch, the stronger that habit becomes. Over time, the behaviour could become automatic. When getting to the spot to have lunch, the individual would decide to get a bottle of water without even thinking about it. This is how habits are formed but this also provides us with the clues how we can change them. It is not about doing exercise or getting to the gym, its understanding what is lying behind it.
New habits are not easily formed because they are a routine. How often do we need to do something for it to become a routine? 96 undergraduate students were asked to carry out a behaviour of their choice (e.g., drinking water with lunch, eating fruit with lunch, running before dinner) for 84 days. They reported how automatic the chosen behaviour had become in a daily survey. Some people take longer than others. In addition, some people take very long to develop a new habit (254 days). But you have to do it at least for 66 days.
For you to lose weight is not through a diet for instance. You need to start seating healthy food in a new place, so you detach your old ways of eating with your old habits. Make sure you create an environment, where you will feel good when trying out a new recipe. Your mind should realize that eating healthy makes you feel good and happy.
It is also important to tackle our sense of powerlessness to our addictions to bad habits. They make us feel, we are not in the driving seat but they control us. But we have to remember, we are adults now. We tell our brain when to move the hand to the cookie jar or not. We have to reclaim our power and a new diet will not fix this mindset. Our mind needs to feel good when eating salad over time and bad when our hand goes to the cookie jar. It needs to overcome previous positive emotions that we attached to our “comfort” food.
Observe what your mind tells you when you do drink that glass of wine. Is it in situations of stress, peer pressure? Can you not say no when everyone is drinking? Realize when the urge comes to go back to the old routine that its only a habit. It is not because you truly crave the chocolate cookie. Repeat the new habit every day for 66 days, to form a new habit. Its not the diet, that will make you eat healthy, it’s the healthy habit to have fun preparing your healthy dinner at 6pm every evening in your kitchen. You will feel discomfort, as with all changes. But tell yourself, that this is normal. Our emotions are powerful and form a unique part of the process of changing habits although hardly anyone talks about it.
