20 Tips to Make New Healthy Habits Stick
If you’re reading this, you are probably struggling to make new healthy habits stick. Or you’re just starting a new habit and have fallen off the health wagon before, so you need some tools in your toolbox to keep that from happening again. In my quest for better health, sticking with a new habit has been the hardest obstacle to overcome. I’ve had some success in this battle, although my track record isn’t perfect. Life always tries to get in the way. So, I did some research and developed some ideas of my own to improve my chances of success. Now that I’ve joined the Medicare generation, keeping these habits is more important than ever.
Resources to Help Make Healthy Habits Stick
In addition to the tricks I used, I researched other tips and tricks to help develop and maintain new healthy habits. Many resources teach the same principles, but I found two resources that embody most of them. Atomic Habits by James Clear and an article by Scott Young at LifeHack.org.
You don’t have to use all of these tips to make a good habit stick, but they give you a pool of ideas to work with. Just pick and choose which ones you want to experiment with. In Atomic Habits, James Clear lays out four core principles to follow that help your new, positive habits stick. Everything that follows is built on these principles:
- Make it obvious
- Make it attractive
- Make it simple
- Make it satisfying
To stop a bad habit, you do the opposite:
- Make it invisible
- Make it unattractive
- Make it difficult
- Make it unsatisfying
Keeping those core principles in mind, let’s get started.
Get Your Head in the Game
Change how you see yourself. In Atomic Habits, Mr. Clear uses the example of offering a cigarette to two people who have just quit. The first says, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.” The second one says, “No thanks, I’m not a smoker.” It may seem like a small difference, but it can help you move forward. If you are starting to eat a healthy diet, then see yourself as healthy. If you are starting to exercise, see yourself as fit. Your self-image may scream the opposite, but health and fitness begin when you make that first change in your lifestyle. It’s not what you see or feel. It’s what you do that counts.
Make a Plan
Pick a time and place where you will perform your new healthy habits. Let’s say you follow the recommendation of this blog and start by committing to just one exercise per day. If you’re a morning person, you might want to do that exercise while your coffee is brewing. When I started, I set a deadline. If I didn’t do my exercise earlier in the day, I did it while supper was cooking. I still do my workout that way.
Prep Your Environment
Make sure your space stays ready for exercise if possible. Have your equipment (if you use any) visible. Changing your diet? Put your healthiest foods at the easiest-to-access areas of your freezer, fridge, cabinets, or pantry. That way you always have the “cue” to make the healthy choice. If you want to drink more water, fill up some water bottles and keep them in the places where you spend the most time.
Commit to 30 Days to Form Your Healthy Habits
When you start your new habit, commit to doing it for 30 days. Research shows that it takes 3-4 weeks for new activities to become habits.
Do It Every Day
When you start a new habit, perform that habit every day, 7 days a week, for those first 30 days. Later on, you can give yourself a day or two off each week.
Start Small. Start Simple
If you’re out of shape, don’t try to do a full workout. Commit to just one set of one exercise per day at first. For example, you might want to do push ups one day and squats or lunges the next or just do push ups every day. Changing your diet? Start with changing one thing (drink more water, add a salad every day, etc) Pick the easiest change you can possibly make in the beginning. Creating a new healthy habit is more important than the habit you choose.
Make Your New Habits an Experiment
Commit to the first 30 days as an experiment. If it was hard to keep, make adjustments and try again. It’s not failure, just an experiment in behavior modification.
Change How You Describe Your New Habit
More head games. Don’t say, “I have to work out.” Say, “I get to work out so I can feel better.”
Measure Success by the Habit Itself
Because you are making small changes, you may not notice any difference in how you feel at first. Don’t let that derail you. Forming the new habit is it’s own success.
Focus on the Process, and Not the Goal
If you’re goal oriented, you can skip this. But not all people are goal oriented, and I’m one of them. Goal setting has mostly been a recipe for failure in my life. Once I realized that, I changed my perspective. Now my goals are kind of vague (I want to be healthier, I want to stay off medications for lifestyle diseases, etc.). I achieve success every day I do something toward realizing that dream. Every day I work out and eat healthy food is a success. Doing the thing is the victory. This was a game changer for me.
Celebrate Your Victories
When I started doing push ups, I did a fist pump every time I could add another rep before I hit failure. About a month and a half after I started, I felt good after my one set of push ups and wanted to exercise more, so I added bicep curls with a set of dumb bells. That got a fist pump, too.
Couple Your Healthy Habits with Rewards
If a fist pump isn’t enough, try this. After you do your exercise or eat that healthy supper, take time to pamper yourself with a favorite pastime such as watching a movie, spending time on social media, reading, etc. You may want to intentionally time your new habit so you can link it with an immediate reward of something enjoyable.
Record Your New Healthy Habits
Every day you perform your new habit, mark it down on a calendar. A great old-fashioned way to do this is to mark an “X” on a calendar. If you miss a day, you have that blemish in your calendar record that may spur you to resume.
Be Imperfect
When I was a teenager, my brothers and I used to work with young horses. Sometimes when we were saddle breaking them, we would get bucked off. Our rule was, “If you aren’t going to the hospital, get back on.” If you miss a day or more with your new habit, don’t beat yourself up. Don’t get discouraged. Just start over again.
Find an Accountability Partner or Partners
The Lone Ranger wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much done without Tonto. Weight Watchers (now WW) and other diet programs use this principle successfully. If you don’t know anybody personally who can fulfill this role, there are groups on social media who are walking the same walk you are. Just be sure to avoid groups with a lot of trolls and negativity.
Consider the Benefits
Remind yourself of the benefits you are trying to realize through your new habit. If it’s eating healthier, then the benefits are losing weight, having more energy, just plain feeling better, and maybe even reducing or eliminating medications.
Consider the Pain
Conversely, think about the negative outcomes if you don’t make the change. I’m staring down the barrel at my golden years, and I don’t want to become a weak, brittle, bent-over old man with a cane. I got close to that before I started making changes, and I didn’t like it at all.
Find Multiple Ways to Measure Progress
At first, you measure progress by how many days in a row you successfully perform your new habit. Over time, you may lose weight, get stronger, have more endurance, etc.
Record Your Progress
I have an app on my Android phone called Quick Memo where I note what I do and how I feel each day. I keep it short and sweet. Here is a recent note: “Worked on removing stump. Cut 18” log with manual saw, 100 strokes before stopping. 700+ strokes total.” My progress was that I set a new record in how many strokes with the manual saw I took before having to stop and rest.
Keep Your Healthy Habits Going Even if Your Environment Changes
If you travel a lot or have other challenges that make keeping your new habit difficult, develop a plan to deal with it. This is one reason it’s best to make one small change at a time. It’s easier to adapt.
Most people won’t need to employ all of these ideas. Start with the ones you feel will do you the most good. Add or delete them as needed until you find what works best for you.
Both of the resources I used to help put this article together are worth reading. They cover even more ways to make good habits stick and break bad habits, and I highly recommend them.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. It’s the same with new habits. Keep them small, keep them simple and don’t give up.
Now, go do something for your health.
