OLD HABITS DIE HARD: HOW TO TACKLE THE CHALLENGES OF CHANGE
Old habits die hard. It’s a saying for a reason. Changing habits and creating change in your life is challenging. Oftentimes it requires unlearning and relearning new patterns and thought processes that have been ingrained in us for many years. Our brains are resistant to change. It’s a way of trying to keep us safe. However, if we resist change, nothing changes. We don’t grow, we stay stagnant.
Sometimes the best things come from accepting and embracing change in our lives. Think back to anytime you have accomplished something. Did it come from staying in your old patterns and habits? Probably not. It likely felt scary at first. Perhaps a little bit challenging and required going out of your comfort zone to some extent.
WHY IS CHANGE SO HARD?
MINDSET
Most often when people jump into goals, they are motivated and ready to go all in. They want to see results and they are ready to push hard. This creates an all or nothing mindset. Have you ever had a goal to lose weight? You find the perfect restrictive diet and plan to hit the gym 6 days a week. You are pumped and ready. You get two weeks into your new plan and burn out. You miss a day of training, eat something “not on plan” and soon one day turns into two, into three…you get the idea. You figure if you can’t do it perfectly, you can’t do it at all and nothing happens until you feel motivated again months later down the road.
How to improve this? The all or nothing mindset typically doesn’t get anyone anywhere for very long and can make you feel pretty frustrated after a while. You CAN create change. Knowing you are capable of being successful is step number one. Create micro habits. You don’t have to change everything all at once. Identify one small habit you can implement until that feels easy. Then layer on another one. If your goal is to exercise more frequently, start with a reasonable and attainable goal. 30 min 2x per week might be a good starting place. Refraining from getting trapped into the mindset of it’s not good enough and not worth doing. Something is better than nothing. When you can do this consistently, then add a day or increase your time spent training. Build upon the habit you already created and work on consistency over perfection. Pick back up where you left off and keep moving forward.
MOTIVATION
Often we wait for motivation before we start something. Motivation is fleeting. It’s a feeling. It won’t always be there and we can’t rely on it to start something or to keep us going.
How to improve this? Take small actions like the micro habits mentioned above. Action creates results. Results create more motivation. So it’s really action that needs to happen first before we can feel motivated. However, reasonable actions that are sustainable are the key to consistency with changes and will prevent falling into the all or nothing mindset.
FEAR OF FAILURE
Sometimes our goals are big and we reflect on past experiences and feel like we haven’t been successful. This can make us feel scared and hesitant to try again. This is a lack of trust in ourselves. For example,it might prevent us from hiring a coach to help us, or signing up for that new gym membership.
How to improve this? Reframe failure as a learning opportunity. Everytime something doesn’t go as planned, reflect. What circumstances contributed to things not going as planned? What small changes can you make going forward to have a different outcome? Missing a day of training or not hitting your macros doesn’t mean you failed. Reflect, pivot and move forward. Rinse and repeat. Even small changes daily through reflection can change your entire outcome over the course of a year. Failure doesn’t exist, only learning opportunities.
NOT SEEING RESULTS FAST ENOUGH
Most often when we jump all in, we want to see results yesterday. If we don’t see the fruits of our labor fast enough, we will often throw our hands up, ask ourselves why we are working so hard if we aren’t seeing progress and give up, quickly going back to our old habits.
How to improve this? Be realistic with your time frame and focus on the process. If your goal is weight loss, remember you didn’t get to where you are in 3 months, it might take longer than 3 months to get to where you want to be. It’s often not the big things that need to happen but the small habits we implement day in and day out that create the results we want. If we are focused on just the outcome and not the process, what happens when we reach our goal? How will that be sustained? The process is what will get you to your goal and it’s what will maintain your progress. Your processes are the daily micro habits you are implementing. Adding more vegetables to your meals instead of removing all foods you love. Focusing on daily movement instead of focusing on burning calories and no rest days.
LACK OF SELF AWARENESS
We all do things out of habit. Sometimes we aren’t even aware of it. Eating food just because it’s sitting there, pulling our phones out when we are waiting in line or feeling anxious. Wanting to dive face first into the bag of chips right when we walk in the door from work at night. We might not love these habits but find it so hard to stop them. This turns into a cycle of doing and then beating ourselves up, feeling bad, leading us to do them even more.
How to improve this? Develop self awareness around your habits. This is easier said than done. I encourage you to get curious about your habits and behaviors without judgment. You notice yourself eating the chips. Pause. Check in with yourself. Notice when this happens, how do you feel? Hungry? Stressed? Anxious? Tired? Identify what you are experiencing in your body. When we begin to identify how we are feeling we slowly stop the habit loop. From there, we can then work to create new habits by disrupting that habit loop. For example, when developing self awareness, we may notice that we are hungry and stressed when we come home from work. With that awareness, we can better set up our environment when we come home by having a balanced snack available and creating a calm space for down time before getting on with our evening. We are approaching our habits from a place of understanding as opposed to a place of shame and guilt.
There is so much more that can go into the intricacies of habit change. These are a few of the “big” ones that we see so often in coaching. If you feel like you need help with these, consider signing up to work with a coach.
Another great resource is Atomic Habits by James Clear. This book helps break down why we struggle with creating habits and how to create new habits in a sustainable way into your life.
UNTIL NEXT TIME - COACH COURTNEY