Keep the Change? Transform from Habits to a Lifestyle

Habits are us Doing Life, Automatically.

It is our brain’s way of sidestepping a ton of little decisions.

With habits, you do repetitive things with ease.

Why? (There are those darn important three letters again)

Well, at one point, it worked out well for you and you had the desired result.

Desired result?  These are not always positive.  Sometimes they are rewards (like dessert after eating), and other times, they avoid punishment (Mom not yelling at you for not eating all the food on your plate.)

Although the desired result may no longer be relevant, the habit remains.  Let’s say you grew up, moved out, and are now living your own life. Yet, somehow you still feel you deserve a dessert or you feel the nag when you don’t completely clean your plate.

Do these habits still serve you?

They may not.

Let’s Start Changing Habits

First let’s look at how technically a habit works – 

Trigger=>Action=>Reward/Avoid Punishment

Deprogramming a habit is done by 

• Being aware of Triggers
• Changing the Action after the Trigger
• Changing the Reward after the Action
• Quitting the Action after the Trigger

No matter how you look at it, it takes time and patience.

There is no quick 7-day fix.

Yes, they say it takes 21 days to make a habit.  Though really, what they mean to say is it takes time. It can be 14, 21, 30, 60, 90 days or longer.  And during this time, there are relapses and relearning.

Focusing on changing one habit at a time allows the power of your willpower to make this change permanent.

Another way we have found success is changing your lifestyle, your overall patterns.  When you make a commitment many healthy habits can be replaced at the same time. And you gain the synergy of multiple habits supporting change.

Habit to Lifestyle Change

We have found the most successful way to make a change is to grow it up from a habit and create a lifestyle.

Lifestyle changes are multiple related habits linked together.  Think to eat nutritious food and exercising consistently. When you stop eating healthy you notice it in your workouts.  When you stop working out you notice you change from eating as healthy.

Lifestyles changes have exponential cumulative results.  Meaning you can have positive change supporting positive change leading to dramatic results.

The key to a lifestyle change is to continually have a strong enough WHY.

In our next article, we will walk you through step by step on how we can create your WHY.