How do you achieve the goals that you have set for yourself for 2023?   The answer is simple – through implementing habits. 

Whilst goals take time to achieve, as I stated before, the journey is more important because it is the identity change that comes from the practice of habits that is the actual thing that transforms us. 

Mel Robbins says that ‘Habits are the evidence that you see that you’re becoming a different person…before you achieve the goal that you set’. 

A habit is an ACTION that is automatic like brushing your teeth, having a wee on waking, making a coffee at 10.30am. 

Creating habits is easy, it’s just that we overcomplicate the process and we get all emotional about them.  

The first thing we need to understand is that ‘habits are the bridge from who we are now to who we want to be’ (Mel Robbins). So stepping into the identity of and behaving like our future self is really important.  

Here are some questions to ponder on:

• What is a good habit that you would like to create? WHY?

• What is a bad habit you would like to break and change? WHY?

• What kind of person would you like to be? WHY?

The WHY is important (same as the WHY when we talked about setting goals. 

Mel Robbins likens habit creation to the training of a puppy – you have to continuously positively reinforce the training to make it a habit.  

The first thing you need to do is identify what you want to do – what is the habit you want to create. Then you need to identify a reward. Then you find the trigger or cue for that habit. 

3 Main Processes

All those books on goal settings and habit formation (Atomic Habits by James Clear, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg) boil down to 3 processes:

• Trigger
• Action – habit
• Reward

In a puppy – you say ‘sit’ (trigger), the dog sits (habit) and you give the dog a biscuit (rewards). 

With us  – put a glass of water on your kitchen table next to the kettle (trigger), drink water (habit), spend 5 minutes reading a book (reward). I take my son to school (trigger), I go to the gym (habit) I buy myself a coffee (reward)

It’s crucial to focus on the trigger and the reward and not the doing. The ‘doing’ is what we get all emotional about and yet it’s the least important bit of creating habits.  

 

6 Main triggers: 

1. Sound (alarm, netflix music, news).
2. Time of day (waking, breakfast, lunch, after work, picking up kids from school, dinner, evening, bedtime etc)
3. Location (home, family member’s home, work, friends, holiday,,,)
4. Emotional state ( remember the habit of eating chocolate because you’re stressed).
5. Other people – they can either hinder or support
6. Environment – hinders or helps – you can manipulate or use your environment to your advantage.

We might need in some instances to change the triggers for new habits but we can also use the same triggers for new habits. For example, the alarm goes off in the morning, I get up and go to the kitchen to turn off my alarm and I put the kettle on to make a cup of tea. The alarm  is my trigger. Instead of making a cup of tea I could drink a glass of water first. 

The 6pm news used to be a trigger for me to eat a handful of nuts and pour a glass of wine. I can’t change 6pm but I can be aware that 6pm is a trigger for me and I can change my habit to a glass of kombucha instead. 

Rewards are Key

Choosing a reward is SOOOOO important and yet is the one thing that is usually ignored.  Rewards give us a boost of dopamine (the pleasure hormone) which actually makes a habit stick (that’s why bad habits are so hard to break). 

My dog won’t come when I call him if I don’t reward him. He sure as hell won’t come to me if when he comes I shout at him, tell him he’s an idiot or a bad dog or if I whack him.  Yet we do this to ourselves all the bloody time. 

I forgot to exercise or I ate a bowl of ice cream when I had planned not too and so I berate myself and tell myself what a useless piece of crap I am…you know the voice I’m talking about – that’s negative reinforcement. It doesn’t work for dogs and it doesn’t work for us.  It means we’ll give up more readily next time or we’ll take on the identity of someone who never sticks to healthy habits. Stop it! Right now!

What happens if I forget the habit?

If you miss a habit for a day, it actually doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. You haven’t failed. You are not useless and it won’t affect the process of forming these new habits.  A UK study proved that. habits can take anywhere between 18 and 254 days to form and missing a few days here and there doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. Those neural pathways that were formed when you first created that habit are still there. So if you eat a bowl of ice cream when you had planned not – enjoy the damn ice cream and then move on – it doesn’t mean you have to eat a packet of biscuits because you failed. You didn’t!

If however, you never even manage the first day of your new habit then maybe you need to dig into whether you actually really want to practice that habit – is this because you feel you should – what is your WHY? Be honest!   I have for the last 5 years consistently failed at getting up at 5am. I wanted to get up at 5am because I was told I should. Therefore I didn’t do it – my WHY wasn’t strong enough. In saying that I know that lying in and not having a strong morning routine has hampered my goal achievements and I need to step into that morning Sarah identity. 

‘You cannot stay consistent if your change is in your head. You need to get out of your head and into your systems’ –  Mel Robbins

Here are Mel’s 5 systems to sticking to your habits: 

1. MAKE IT VISIBLE – put a list of your habits on your bathroom mirror, put items out as reminders – the water bottle, the gym clothes, the planner, only put the ‘healthy food’ you want to eat in your fridge or cupboard. There is something called ‘Decision Fatigue’  – hard to make ‘good’ decisions and easy to make ‘bad’ decisions when we are tired, its too difficult to think and we can’t be bothered – so we have to make it easy for ourselves by taking away the need to make decisions – by making visible the reminders, the healthy food, using alarms as reminders and by planning (system #3)
2. GET RID OF TEMPTATIONS – make it inconvenient so you don’t fall back on the ‘bad’ habits. If the crap food or wine or whatever it is you want to stop eating isn’t in your cupboard or fridge then you can’t eat it OR lock it away. 
3. TRACK YOUR PROGRESS – remember habits are the bridge so physically track your journey and progress. Use post-it-notes, use an app or use charts and spreadsheets.  
4. PLAN – ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’ – plan how you can make this work – What do you need to do? When can you fit it in?  You also need to plan for when things turn to shit – when X happens then I will Y…This helps with the decision fatigue too – plan you menu and shopping, do your prep at the weekend so all that healthy food is ready to go as and when you need it. 
5. DO IT IN THE MORNING – most important stuff should be done in the morning as we are more focused and we are more likely to have time for ourselves. 
6. FIND YOUR COMMUNITY – accountability, support and encouragement are sooo important too. Maybe this is a facebook group or messenger hub, work colleagues, friends or family members – doesn’t matter as long as they are supportive and help to motivate you.

‘When we make decisions for your future self, we make better decisions’. – Mel Robbins

It’s really important that everyday we tap into our why – What is our end goal? Why are we doing this?  Who do I need to be?  It is equally important that we celebrate at the end of day and when you finally reach that goal. Please don’t skip the celebration. 

 

What healthy habits are you going to introduce? How are you going to do this – what will your trigger be? What will your reward be? 

Come and join me in my facebook group- The Women’s Wellbeing Circle – we start the healthy habits challenge where we will build on this and you will get lots of ideas on the healthiest habits and heaps of resources: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thewomenswellbeingcircle

 

References (for those of you who are nerds like me

1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ejsp.674
2. https://hbr.org/2013/06/you-make-better-decisions-if-you-see-your-senior-self
3. https://resource-allocation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12962-021-00262-y
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26479070/
5. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201101/the-science-success-the-if-then-solution
6. https://youtu.be/DPMvfxjbvw4
7. https://youtu.be/LN5-RKWPeeI

 

Email me at admin@sarah-brenchley.com or book a free discovery call to discuss how I can help you. I offer a 1:1 sessions and various programmes on gut health, empowered eating (non-diet approach to food and weight) and menopause. Go to https://sarah-brenchley.com/links for information and free resources and join the best Facebook Group ever  – Women’s WellBeing Circle. 

Go to my You Tube channel to watch the video versions of my blogs: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmS_kdkO4JsbqyhvfLwOPtA