You know that feeling you get after trying out a new workout routine? You’re tired but mostly amped up, so proud of yourself for finally making the move. By evening you begin to feel it. Your muscles are squealing just a little bit, but that’s ok, you still feel good. By the next morning that squealing gets louder and as the day progresses you feel 50 years older and struggle to get up from a chair.
It was New Year’s Eve and you needed a resolution, swimsuit season was around the corner, or maybe you saw someone that reminded you of something you wanted for yourself. Perhaps you have even been chomping on this goal for over a year or more. Whatever the “why”, you made the decision to alter your habit and start a new healthy behaviour. Yet after one maybe two to three goes at it, your teetering, about to fall off the wagon and eyeing those habitual patterns like a tempting, mouth watering treat. Ah, I can skip today and do it tomorrow… no harm done.
But there is harm done because that tomorrow turns into next year’s resolution until eventually you give up on it all together.
Have you been there? Are you there right now?
Work It, Work It
Retraining habits and behaviours in your mind is just like working out your body. It is never just a one and done thing. The muscle pain you feel from the workout reveals itself in your mind as excuses and ploys to keep you in the circle of bad habits and behaviours. Like a programmed addiction, you keep circling back.
Wouldn’t it be great if you just had to lift weights once and you got immediate results? Or just decide to be and act a certain way and hocus-pocus it happens? Sign me up for that because that would be amazing, but it’s not the world we live in.
“I can skip today and do it tomorrow… no harm done.
But there is harm done because that tomorrow turns into next year’s resolution until eventually you give up on it all together.”
LAHR
Conquer Your Discomfort To Win
You have to break a mental sweat to really make a change and make it stick. Even if that new habit is something like working out. You are not only training your physical body with this task, but your mind as well. Generating new habits is uncomfortable. If it weren’t more people would be successful at doing it. It takes real dedication and a willingness to stare that discomfort in the eye to form a positive and desired new habit.
Whenever you are retraining the brain, consciously “reprogramming”, it takes 2 months to work it into your system and about 6 months for it to become a fully formed unconscious habit – naturally depending on the new behaviour and how ingrained the old, undesired habit might be.
“You have to break a mental sweat to really make a change and make it stick.”
LAHR
Yes, I hear you, but why is this not the case for bad habits?!
Bad habits are formed in our unconscious mind and usually the outcome of trying to be comfortable, take the easy way out. They became a habit because we interpreted them as a kind of reward, often resulting in instant gratification. We stay in our bad habits until we become aware that they are actually harming us – yet even then we don’t budge to make a change. The pain point must be reached to get ourselves to start looking at a new form of discomfort.
Reframe And Press On
See it this way, you are swapping out old discomfort that is hurting you for a new discomfort that will reward you. Whenever you are facing a task that makes you drag your feet, no matter how much you know it will benefit you, it helps to reframe the situation. Remind yourself of the why, what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose should you fall off the wagon. Remember your pain point.
Set-up a Mental Sweat Plan (just like a workout plan) for integrating your new desired behaviour and dropping an old undesired one. Is it something you need to do daily? Every two days? After you have established a clear frequency in which the new behaviour will be carried out, use an instant gratification reward system for when you stick to it. On the days you see it through, what positive thing can you do to reward yourself?
To reinforce the pain point on the days you do not follow through, come up with a punishment for yourself. What privilege do you lose? Is it sleeping in on the weekend? No coffee in the morning? Our brains respond in wondrous ways to positive and negative reinforcers.
Practice makes a master. This applies to anything you want to achieve.
Now get out there and set it in motion.
Article by LAHR
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