How to Build Small Habits for Big Health Changes

Healthy Primary Care

If you want to make a positive change in your life, you should recognize that change requires patience, as well as confidence that your habits are keeping you on the right trajectory - even if you aren’t seeing immediate results. The key is to make one small change at a time.

 
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Habits are behaviors that we perform automatically, with little or no thought.  From making a cup of coffee when you get up in the morning to brushing your teeth before bed at night, our habits subtly guide our daily lives.  

We don’t notice tiny changes, because their immediate impact is negligible.  If you are out of shape today, and go for a 20-minute jog, you’ll still be out of shape tomorrow.  But if we repeat small behaviors day after day, our choices compound into major results.  Go jogging for 20 minutes every day, and you’ll eventually be leaner and fitter, even though you won’t have noticed the change happening.

 

The key to making big changes in your life doesn’t have to involve major upheaval; you don’t need to revolutionize your behavior or reinvent yourself.  Rather, you can make tiny changes to your behavior, which, when repeated time and time again, will become habits that may lead to big results.

4 PROVEN STEPS TO BUILDING HEALTHY HABITS


1. Building a new habit requires hard-to-miss cues and a plan of action.

  • Use implementation intentions to strengthen your cues. Most of us tend to be too vague about our intentions. We say, “I’ll try to exercise more” and hope it sticks. Instead say, “On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, when the alarm goes off, the first thing I’ll do is put on my running gear and jog 2 miles.” Then leave your running shoes out where you’ll see them to give yourself a clear plan and an obvious cue.

2. Making habits attractive will help them stick.

  • We are motivated by the anticipation of reward. If we make a habit something we look forward to, we’ll be much more likely to follow through. A great technique for this is temptation bundling: take a behavior that you think of as important but unappealing and link it to a behavior that you’re drawn to. If you need to work out, but you want to watch Netflix or ESPN, you can commit to only watching television while exercising since you’ll be anticipating a pleasing reward while carrying it out.

3. Use the two-minute rule as a way to make the new activity feel achievable.

  • The principle here is that any activity can be distilled into a habit that is doable within two-minutes. Want to run a marathon? Don’t start by committing a 10 mile run every day - instead commit to simply putting on your running gear every day after work. Once you’ve pulled on your running shoes, you’ll probably head out out for a run.

4. When you are pursuing habits with a delayed return, try to attach some immediate gratification to them.

  • You go to the gym in the morning, but you don’t lose weight overnight. However, exercising with a spouse or friend can provide the immediate gratification needed to keep you on track for the ultimate, longer-term reward.

For your health,

Terry Rimmer, MD

 
 
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Terry RimmerDirect Primary Care of OklahomaHabits, Health