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Week five! So far on our journey, we’ve learned how to:

• Create a New You in 2021
• Pick One Thing
• Start Small
• Habit stack

Now it’s time to get serious about dealing with the very real obstacles on the road to habit change. If you’ve already stumbled in your 2021 goals, it’s time for a fresh start—this time with more tools at hand to help you with the rough patches.

The biggest challenges in habit change can be lumped into two camps.

1. Continuing a negative habit.

This is the “falling off the wagon” scenario in which you’re trying to quit something that doesn’t serve you—perhaps you’re trying to stop smoking, drink less, or avoid foods that you know trigger unhealthy eating. You might be trying to curb your spending, reduce your social media use, or stop being critical of others. But try as you might, one day you give in to the very thing you’ve sworn off.

2. Losing momentum on a positive habit.

This is the opposite scenario, in which you’re trying to start a new positive habit. You might be trying to drink more water, eat more nutritious foods, or exercise more. Perhaps you’re trying to write daily, or develop a meditation practice, or show more gratitude. But try as you might, one day you simply don’t do the very thing you’ve promised to.

One Moment is Not All Moments

Your first approach should be to change the way you feel about obstacles, misfires, lapses, and all other challenges on the way to better habits. You will rarely adopt a new habit perfectly, right away, and this is particularly true of healthy lifestyle changes. Changing your diet, quitting smoking, drinking less alcohol, becoming more active—these are all difficult changes to make. You will almost certainly face challenges.

To this, we say: who cares? Missing one daily walk isn’t a character flaw. Giving in to a less-healthy food choice isn’t going to kill you. 

But what is a problem is letting one bad choice become permission to give up.

One lapse is not a failure. One bad day is not a sentence. Accept that you will face challenges. And plan, right now, to simply get back up each time you fall. This is your habit change, and you get a fresh slate every day if you choose it.

Implementation Intentions 

Psychology has some help for staying the course in the form of implementation intentions. Simply put, this is a plan for when and where you intend to perform a new habit. 

Author James Clear says:

The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence:

I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

• I will meditate for one minute at 7 a.m. in my kitchen.
• I will study Spanish for twenty minutes at 6 p.m. in my bedroom.
• I will exercise for one hour at 5 p.m. in my local gym.
• I will make my partner a cup of tea at 8 a.m. in the kitchen.

To apply this to a negative habit, try using a substitute behaviour. “When I get the urge to [negative behaviour] I will do [positive behaviour].” The idea is that this pre-planning can interrupt your habit loop enough to get you past the initial urge.

Know Your Triggers and Pitfalls

Habits are neural patterns. They’re wired into your brain in a kind of loop, and every loop has a cue—a signal that initiates the pattern. Stress makes you crave a drink. The chime of your phone causes you to check your messages.

If you observe your negative habits, you can look for the cues that precede them. What happened just before I went down the YouTube rabbit hole? Why did I have the drink I didn’t really want?

Likewise, if you observe the times you stumble on your positive habits, you can ask similar questions. Why did I miss that walk? Why didn’t I make a lunch yesterday?

The beauty of this approach isn’t just that you can avoid future problems, but that you get to treat a “failure” as a way of getting better. Each time your habit change breaks down, you get to learn a way to make your habit stronger in the future. 

As you can tell from the list above, anticipating problems is just that—it’s anticipating. It’s looking ahead and knowing that life happens. That things don’t always go as planned. It’s not expecting that your progress will be perfect or easy. 

We all want to be hopeful. Optimistic. We’re drawn to the failure is not an option attitude. 

When it comes to habits, however, we prefer failure isn’t permanent. Expect that there will be bumps on the habit highway. Take them with all the grace you can. Learn from them.

Then cut yourself some slack and keep on going!

Welcome to Week 4! If you’ve been following along, then you’ll know our journey so far looks like this:

1. How to Create a New You in 2021
2. Pick One Thing
3. Start Small

At this point, it’s not unusual for a few speed bumps to have popped up on the road to better habits. In fact, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ve hit something that slowed your progress or even derailed you altogether.

Forget about it. Really. Every day is a new day. If you fell down yesterday, just pick yourself up and start fresh today. That’s the beautiful thing about personal change: you get to decide the rules. And if you’re the boss, why not be more forgiving? If you stumble, start anew.

But WHY, you ask, does it have to be soooo hard?

Excellent question. And the answer reveals a useful tool for your habit-building toolbox.

Getting “Triggered”

If you’ve read Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit (summary), then you’ll know that habits are reinforcing loops that have triggers. A stressful event, for example, might trigger a habitual response, like smoking, or eating something sweet.

One of the challenges with getting your new habit to stick is that it’s not linked to any triggers yet. If you’re trying to drink more water, for example, you might find you simply…forget! You might even have a bottle full of water on your desk but realize at the end of the day that you’ve hardly touched it. 

For all your good intentions, without someone or something to prod you to actually do the habit, it simply falls by the wayside. 

Habit Stacking

One way to combat this is with habit stacking. Using this technique, you “piggyback” your fresh and very fragile new habit on top of something else that has a more established routine.

Let’s take a closer look at that “drink more water” habit. What if we tried to piggyback your desired action (drinking water) with something specific that you already do? 

Here’s how that can work.

If you’re like most people, you start your day with a cup of coffee or tea. You stumble bleary-eyed into the kitchen, turn on the coffee maker, and wait patiently for that first cup. Most people do some variation of this every single morning of their adult life. 

Now: what if you put a glass of water beside the coffee maker?

That’s it. 

When you stumble out to the kitchen, what’s the first thing you see? The glass. You hit the button on the coffee maker, drink your glass of water, and there, just like that, you’re already ahead of the game. You’ve won the day!

That’s just one glass of water. But what if you put a glass next to the sink in the bathroom? What would happen then? 

What if you put an empty glass next to every tap in your house, and make a point of drinking a glass of water each time you enter that room? It might not work every time, but sometimes that little reminder attached to another habit is all you need.

What Existing Habits Can You Use?

To make habit-stacking work, you need to look for your existing patterns. What do you do every day no matter what? What do you do multiple times a day, every day? 

Once you’ve identified a few, look for ways to stack a new habit:

• Take a short walk after dropping your kids at the bus stop
• Do five pushups each time you leave the bathroom
• Think of something you’re grateful for each time you brush your teeth
• Stretch for five minutes each time you put your pyjamas on

How can you attach the habit you want to the habits you have?

Recommended reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear

Kids will be heading back into the classroom next week, and after the initial celebration by parents is over and the weather cools, thoughts turn to avoiding the seemingly inevitable “back to school” cold—both in our kids and ourselves!

Here are some of our best tips and tools as you head back into a new school year.

1. Sleep

Kids are chronically under-slept, and homework, extra-curriculars, and excessive screen time can contribute to the problem. Be mindful of this as the school year begins, and guard this aspect of health. Sleep is where we repair and recuperate—not enough of it means your immune system is more easily overwhelmed.  

How much sleep is enough? Here’s a starting point.

2. Keep them Outside

The school year means being inside. It means more sitting and breathing re-circulated air, surrounded by dozens of other kids. Make sure your kids spend daily time outside moving their bodies (and therefore their blood and immune systems) in the fresh air. It’s a critical part of keeping their immune systems strong and healthy.  

3. Eat for Immune System Success

What does that mean? It’s easy: avoid sugar and go for the healthy proteins. Here are some ideas that kids love.  

4. Supplement

We love Fit For School probiotics by Genestra which includes, probiotics, vitamin C and vitamin D, or MetaKids chewable probiotic only. Both are pretty yummy, but if you aren’t sure if your kids will like them, drop by the clinic. We always have a bottle/package open for a sample!

More:

::Back to School Advice from the StoneTree Naturopaths