You wake up early on Monday intending to change your life.  You have thought about it and feel it’s time to find the ‘new you.’So off you go to the gym, you eat a healthy breakfast, you get up every hour during work to move, you eat your prepared lunch, you go for a walk in the evening instead of crashing on the couch after a healthy dinner, early to bed, up the next morning to do it again. But by the end of the week, you find yourself on the couch again watching reruns and eating chocolate when you should be at the gym or doing your food prep after a day of sleeping late, not moving, eating whatever was in the cafe, and taking out for dinner.

Does this sound like you or someone you know?

It’s not that you didn’t want to change, you did. So what happened?

The question is raised – ‘How do we make our habits stick?’
I’ve got two things for you to think about and put into practice to help you succeed with your new healthy habits.

 Overcoming Habit Overload: The Power of Small, Incremental Changes

Too often we want everything all at once and this leads us to one or two weeks (or even days) of good intentions towards changing habits but then our brain is overwhelmed with the changes and gives up.   We fall right back into our old habits because it’s easy to do. Our brains will naturally choose the well-worn pathways because it doesn’t use as much energy to do so by choosing only one or two things to work on at a time we are giving our brains time to make these changes into well-worn pathways or, habits.  Once we have succeeded for a few weeks or even a month we can then add in the next thing we want to change.

Using Cues to Build Consistent Habits: A Personal Success Story

What is a cue?  A cue is something you use to remind yourself to do something. I’ve used this when creating a habit of recording my food intake.  An important habit to have if I want real results.  What cue have you used?  I’ve got my food diary sitting on my kitchen bench with a RED pen sitting on it.  My cue is my RED pen on my diary.  I’m using the color of my pen in contrast to my book as a reminder to write in the diary.    It stands out, not something I can miss and I see it every day, multiple times.  It’s now in the front of my mind.  Does it work?  I think I’ve only missed a couple of days in the last two months!

What can you use as a cue?  Anything that stands out to you and reminds you to do what needs to be done.  Anything that will bring your new intentions into mind.

So what habits do we change first?  I’ll write about that another time.