Habits are daily tasks and activities you do without thinking. They take no will power or motivation. You just do them with little effort.
Some will serve you, some won’t. For example, that daily habit of brushing your teeth is beneficial to you. There’s no arguing with that – brushing your teeth is good for everyone and I’m sure 99% of adults manage this with no issues.
Whereas if you are overweight and looking to lose some weight, your daily habit of a break time biscuit may not be serving you well. Again if this is something you’ve always done and everyone around you does at your place of work then it becomes an easy habit to master. Whether it serves you or not.
Habits are usually ingrained over a period of time – it doesn’t happen overnight, whether it’s a ‘good’ habit or ‘bad’ habit.
New habits that serve us well are difficult to develop and it’s equally challenging to ditch habits that don’t take us towards our goals.
One tactic you can adopt to help is to change your environment.
This can be the people you surround yourself with, your physical situation and also what you expose yourself to – TV, Magazines etc
Here are a couple of examples…….
There was a company that wanted to improve the health of their workers and identified that drinking water would be a good place to start. They educated everyone on the importance of drinking water instead of high calorie soft drinks but nothing changed. They made the water much cheaper, but again nothing changed. They still noticed the soft drinks from the vending machines were still much more popular than the cheaper, healthier bottled water.
They went back to the drawing board. Instead of trying to convince their work force to buy water they said nothing but instead they changed the layout of their staff canteen. The vending machine was out the way in the corner and they moved the bottled water to more convenient, readily available places in the canteen. Sales of water went up and sales of soft drinks went down. Without doing anything other than changing the environment the company managed to have a positive influence on the habits of their work force.
You will be surprised by the impact other people have on your habits. People want to feel part of something and despite knowing you shouldn’t be eating ‘Fat Friday’ at the office you will be much more inclined to do so if the rest of your colleagues are doing so at lunch. It would be a bit extreme to quit your job to avoid this but you could remove yourself from that environment on your lunch – go a walk, get out and about instead of feeling pressured into getting involved in ‘Fat Friday’.
If you look at many commercial gyms you will see the same people doing the same workouts every day for weeks on end and not getting any results. They will be training on machines doing boring bouts of cardio, hardly breaking a sweat and getting no results. If you sign up to a gym like this chances are you will start training like these people. Their habits will become your habits and if these don’t serve you get out and join a better gym before it’s too late.
I was in Liverpool a few weeks ago and went to a hotel gym. Lots of machines and not a lot of people working hard. My routine for that day involved Burpees. As I started doing them, people were giving me strange looks and it did feel uncomfortable. The environment was not used to this type of training and despite people knowing this is maybe what they should be doing it will be more difficult when everyone else is doing something else.
Developing new habits and kicking old habits is a difficult thing to do. Don’t make it more difficult by exposing yourself to things / people / places that won’t help.
I understand that you can’t change everything but there will be certain things you can manipulate in your favour to ensure you can work towards changing some habits as easily as possible.
Don’t make things harder than they need to be for you.
Coach Milligan 