Ahh mid January. Freezing temperatures, playoff football and the end of many New Year’s resolutions. I don’t mean to be negative but the numbers don’t lie. According to U.S. News, about 80% of resolutions fail by the second week of February. I know it’s only January but if your resolution has already gone by the wayside, one major mistake is probably to blame.
Human nature
Humans are creatures of habit. It’s estimated that 40% or more of what we do each day is habitual. One key characteristic of a habit is that it occurs in an area of the brain that is more or less on autopilot. When a you receive a signal for a routine behavior, you start craving a reward for completing a certain task. You complete the task and get your reward to round out the habit loop.
These habits and routines, that make up about half of our lives, are extremely powerful. Try skipping your morning coffee or favorite Netflix series for a week and you’ll start to see just how powerful they are. So when something like a New Year’s resolution comes along it can be extremely difficult to either implement or remove something in our lives.
There is a reason why new habits are so hard to implement and old habits are so hard to break. The reason is humans are inherently lazy and don’t want to change. This is actually a good thing! For most of human history we were out in the wild trying to get by. It didn’t make sense, from a survival standpoint, to go above and beyond the status quo. We didn’t want to do anymore work than what was necessary. Changing something meant having to expend mental and sometimes physical energy to get the job done. Who wants more work? This is a simple way to look at ourselves but it doesn’t make it any less true.
How to change
Some of us know we need to make massive changes in our lives. It’s great that we can recognize a problem and the need to take action. But one big misconception is that massive change requires massive action. Massive action tends to work in theory but over the long-run it mostly ends in failure. What we should focus on instead is small change that we can build on over time.
Imagine your New Year’s resolution as a house. A house doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. There are a lot of steps to building a house. Building a house typically takes place over the course of months. The fist step to building a house is usually constructing a solid foundation. Walls go up on the foundation and then the walls support the roof. In between those major milestones are thousands of nails, screws, wires, bolts, boards, etc. that need to be put into their proper place. Each step of the building process relies on previous steps. Therefore, pounding in one specific nail has more significance beyond that one nail. That nail holds a board, which supports a wall, that holds drywall, that contains a doorway… I could go on and on but you get the idea. Each step builds upon previous steps until you end up with a finished house!
Start to think of your New Year’s resolution the same way. To make it work, and more importantly to make it last, you need to start small. Over time you need to add something new to your resolution, but not something that requires major effort or ability. Each day will build off the last until you end up with something truly remarkable.
Fitness examples
When I say start small, I mean small. I’m talking so small that it almost seems absurd. Remember, all we’re trying to do at first is establish a habit. We’re not even focused on what that habit hopes to achieve yet. That will come over time with incremental improvements.
Let’s say you’re trying to do 50 pushups. A great way to accomplish this would be to do one pushup right after your brush your teeth in the morning. You know exactly when you’re going to do your pushup each day and how many you have to do. Week one is one pushup. Then in week two you up it to two pushups. Keep adding one more pushup each week. There are 52 weeks in a year. I can almost guarantee that if you can do one pushup on day one then you will be doing 50 pushups at the end of the year, no problem.
The factor driving success here is that your pushups will never seem too hard or overwhelming. By the time the pushups do get hard, the habit of doing them will be so ingrained that it will seem harder not to do them.
Food logging
Food logging is the holy grail of health and wellness in my opinion. The simple act of putting the food you eat into an app will almost automatically change your behavior for the better. Yet food logging is often viewed as too burdensome and tedious to do. Not when you start small!
Take the same approach with food logging as with the pushups. In week one only enter the fist thing you eat for the day. You have the perfect cue for when to log: when you first put something into your mouth. If you always start the day with coffee then great! Food apps store previous entries so you’ll likely need just a couple taps of your phone to get your coffee logged. In week two do the same thing except enter the first two things you consume in a day. Tapping your phone a few times certainly isn’t too overwhelming or difficult. Most of us do this 24/7 anyway.
The beauty about food apps is that they even store entire meals and recipes. After a couple months, 90% of everything you eat will be in your app. It beats the heck out of when I first started fitness coaching. Back then it was pen and paper, ugh. I had add up calories and macros on my abacus by candle light at the end of each day. Then I would hop on my horse and ride home.
If you’re starting a new habit, start small. Don’t overwhelm yourself at the beginning and cause yourself to give up. Make it easy. Make it so you can win on a daily basis. Time is your friend. Be patient. Small change will add up over time and eventually give you the big results you’re looking for.
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