The Science Of Creating Healthy Habits & Maintaining Them
Wanting to create healthier habits is a critical starting point. But, you need much more to actually create and sustain them.
A road map is needed for moving towards and arriving at your goals. That road map is a collection of goal-supporting habits. Learn more about firstpost.com.
Unfortunately, people start new habits but mostly quit those habits within six months.
How can you start and maintain healthy habits? In this article, we use the science of habit development to discuss how to break bad habits, promote new habits, and know how to tell if you’re making progress or not.
Jump to Topic:
- The Value of Healthy Habits
- Why Maintaining Healthy Habits Is So Hard
- How to Sustain Healthy Habits
- How to Start New Habits
The Value Of Healthy Habits
We’re often tempted to reach our goals in the fastest way possible. If you’re like us, you want to drive 90 miles per hour on your road trip to shave off a few minutes and arrive at the destination faster.
When it comes to reaching health and fitness goals, people often use rigorous approaches that require large amounts of time and effort. These are the best testosterone booster for men.
Unfortunately, our time and effort towards goals decreases in less than six months (Gibbs et al., 2012). As a result, it’s common for people to lose their progress beyond six months (Wood & Neal, 2016).
Instead of focusing on time- and energy-consuming approaches, you’re more likely to reach and maintain your goals by making sustainable habit changes.
A long-term study from the University of Pittsburgh illustrated this point (Gibbs et al., 2012). In the study, instead of using aggressive calorie tracking for the sake of losing weight, over 400 women focused on simple, healthy diet changes.
The researchers followed up with the participating women at two points in the future: six months and four years later.
Successful long-term weight loss was linked with the following habits: decreasing the consumption of dessert, sugar-sweetened beverages, meats and cheeses, and with an increase in fruit and vegetable consumption. Check these cortex reviews.
What’s the takeaway? Use simple, relevant habit changes to create sustainable progress.
Why Maintaining Healthy Habits Is So Hard
Creating and sustaining new habits is difficult for several reasons (Wood & Neal, 2016):
- Habits are driven by cues. When we reach a time of day or see a specific image, we automatically think about specific foods or activities. For example, opening the pantry to see cookies. Eating cookies wasn’t what you set out to do, but after seeing them they are all you want to eat.
- Habits are driven by environment. The presence of support (or lack of it), availability of options, and the ease of taking action all play a big role in what actions we take. Common environmental influences come from the people you live with. Eating healthier and staying consistent with workouts is much harder to do when the people around you don’t value or practice the same lifestyle choices.
- Existing habits can get in the way of new habits. With habit change, we not only make the effort to start new habits but also have to work to break old habits. For example, starting a new habit of exercising after work might also require stopping a post-work glass of wine.
If we want to create sustainable habits, we should take a look at the cues and environments that consciously and subconsciously affect us. Also, we should consider what existing habits are preventing us from creating new habits.
How To Sustain Healthy Habits
Before we dive into starting new habits, let’s discuss how to break interfering existing habits. Breaking a habit involves a few approaches, including the following two (Wood & Neal, 2016).
Stop The Habit-Causing Cues
Examples of this are changing your commute to avoid driving by a fast food restaurant or no longer going to the room at work where the candy jar is located. Replace the candy jar on your desk with fruit, or remove it entirely to avoid the visual cue that stimulates the desire to consume when you’re not hungry.
In general, remove incentives and prompts that make the negative habit easier to sustain.
Change Your Environment
Add obstacles between you and the habits you want to stop. Throw out the ice cream in your home Most importantly, avoid buying more. Place your TV remote in an inconvenient location. Put your phone on the other side of the room or in a separate room from where you sleep in an effort to get more and better quality sleep.
How To Start New Habits
To develop new habits, the following three techniques support starting and continuing new behaviors.
Repetition
The cliche recommendation that a habit is formed in 21 days isn’t an exact science, but there’s some accuracy to it.
Performing an action consistently, such as daily, leads to habit formation after a while. How long does a habit take to form?
The research varies. Some experiments showed as little as 18 days of consistency, while over 200 days were necessary in other research (Wood & Neal, 2016).
Pick a time frame to perform the habit daily and stick to that commitment.
Create Habit-Supporting Cues
Cues not only trigger us towards undesirable behaviors but also can be used to drive us towards healthy behaviors.
Example cues that drive us towards healthy habits are leaving a gym bag by the front door, using a phone alarm to alert you when to get ready for bed, or leaving a bowl of fruit on the counter. Another great goal-reinforcing cue from author and investor Nir Eyal is to tape a crisp $100 bill to your calendar, place a lighter nearby, and burn the bill if you don’t complete the habit you set out to do that day.