Discover The Best Way To Build Habits And Gain Control Of Your Health

The way you build good habits is the same way you build bad habits.

The Best Way To Build Habits For Health

What is the best way to build habits?

Habits have a clear impact on your health. They determine what you eat, how much you sleep, and the amount of exercise you do. Habits help you find shortcuts to completing tasks or solving problems without copious contemplation like brushing your teeth, drinking a cup of coffee, or getting dressed for work. But they aren’t only practices you do consistently, they fundamentally shape who you are down to the neurological network in your brain. Habits are hardwired into you as mental shortcuts. These shortcuts largely influence your daily actions, and those daily actions effect your health.

This habit to health association makes addressing your habits the best place to start when seeking a specific health outcome. However, most approach the development of habits all wrong. They rely on sheer willpower or the ability to “just do it.” But in the end, this approach will likely fail you.

Why?

Well you tried to force a habit.

Build Habits – Good and Bad

Building habits isn’t difficult. In fact, you’re a pro and you just don’t know. (this was my attempt at making a rhyme.) How can I say that? Because you build habits and continue to reinforce them all the time. You’ve been doing this for years and it has worked consistently.

Not convinced?

Consider the bad habits you want to forget. How did you start that habit? What actions have you taken to keep it up? When do you practice it? How does it make you feel? Why do you do it? Why can’t you stop it?

There are reasons you built bad habits, continue to reinforce them, and can’t shake them. Discover those reasons and you’ll have your key to breaking bad habits and building new habits.

The way you build good habits is the same way you build bad habits.  

If your bad habit is drinking soda, I’m sure you didn’t force yourself to drink it consistently by sheer willpower. So don’t take the same approach when developing good habits. Use the method that already works for you. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Change Your Environment

Your bulletproof formula for building habits may not be clear to you at the moment. However, I promise you have one that is working for you and your ENVIRONMENT is a part of it.

Create a conducive environment for your habits to flourish and you will drastically increase your chances of building habits. The habit building process relies on key levers that make you want to practice them, and your environment is the main lever. It wields the most power to create change.

Consider these examples:

Example 1: You know eating fruit is a good for your health. However, you don’t eat fruits nearly enough. One reason is accessibility. If an apple is in the fridge, in a drawer, pushed to the back, your chances of eating that piece of fruit decline. Now, move that apple to the kitchen counter or next to your car keys and your chances of eating the fruit drastically increases. Next time you leave for work, you take that apple with you. With your environment changed, so did your action.

Example 2: Say your favorite fruit is pineapple. You buy one and put it on the counter like the apple. After a week you realize it’s not getting eaten like the apple. You decide to change your approach by cutting up the pineapple and putting it in the front of the fridge. Within days the pineapple is gone. Why? Because you increased your accessibility to the pineapple by eliminating the preparation step of cutting it.

These examples are focused on how you can change your environment to promote action. The more consistently your environment promotes those actions, the sooner those actions develop the habit you want to achieve. You don’t need to will your way to building habits; you just need to shape your environment to reduce the friction for good habits and increase the friction for habits you want to stop.

If you’re interested in building habits to gain control of your health, register for our Small Group Program.