Habits are firmly anchored in everyday life and often keep us from our goals. You can easily break them off with a few simple tricks and turn them into healthy routines.
Consuming less sugar, meditating more often or eating more fruits and vegetables – healthy habits can significantly improve the quality of life and help achieve fitness and health goals.
However, it is often not that easy to consistently incorporate these beneficial aspects into life in the long term. The quick, unhealthy temptations of everyday life sometimes seem too tempting.
Resist Temptation
However, there is no need to despair for those who faint from time to time. A study shows that sticking to these healthy routines doesn’t necessarily require more willpower.
“Habits develop from what you do, not from choices or opinions about things,” explains professor and author of ‘Good Habits, Bad Habits’, Wendy Wood, in an interview with ‘Psychology Today ‘.
Live A Healthier Life With Three Simple Tricks
In her work, Wood describes three simple tricks that make it easier to incorporate healthy habits into everyday life:
Create A Positive Environment
The place you are, the people you surround yourself with, the activities you are currently doing – all of these influence your behavior.
By adapting these aspects of your environment to your goal, it becomes easier to incorporate a previously unfamiliar routine into your everyday life and repeat it regularly.
For example, if you want to get into the habit of spending a healthy lunch break away from your desk each day, you can ask a colleague to spend that time together outside of the office.
It can also help to agree to only go to healthy food stores and avoid unhealthy snacks and fast food.
These agreements put a certain “pressure” on personal actions, thereby helping to develop healthier habits.
Repeat Actions
Repeating an action solidifies it in the daily routine. This makes it easier for you to do it regularly until it has finally found its way automatically into your daily routine.
This means: A healthy habit only develops if it is pursued consistently.
So it’s not enough to eat a portion of vegetables now and then – you have to pull yourself together to cook healthy food regularly. While this may seem difficult at first, regularity will eventually be rewarded.
Studies suggest that it can take six to nine months to form a habit and internalize it.
In this way, you can also train yourself to use healthy snacks. When shopping regularly, nutritious nuts and delicious fruit end up in the shopping trolley instead of chips and the like.
This helps lead to a healthier lifestyle in the long run and helps save a few calories.
Incentive Rewards
Both the environment and the repetitions are necessary to maintain healthy habits over the long term.
However, to avoid losing motivation along the way, small “rewards” are crucial in between.
To help with habit formation, they have to activate the reward center in the brain.
This is necessary for the hormone dopamine to be released and associated with healthy behavior. As a result, this experience is stored as positive and the likelihood of repeating it increases.
So if you want to do more sports but can’t motivate yourself to go to the gym, it helps to include an aspect that you enjoy in training.
For example, you can listen to a podcast or watch videos while sweating on the cross-trainer. As long as you’re having fun, the new routine is more likely to become a habit.
ALSO READ: TEN TIPS FOR A HEALTHY, LONG LIFE