On starting and maintaining healthy habits
Maintaining healthy habits is very difficult. Eating healthy, working out, saving money… it’s easy on the paper and becomes suddenly hard when it comes to the actual life.
Getting rid of bad habits is hard, and probably even harder than keeping the good ones.
You fancy a glass of Coca Cola during dinner, you eat a little too much chocolate, you fancy a good slide of bread with a generous layer of peanut butter.
You know you should not eat them, but at the end of the long day, your energy level is low, you have been working hard. It’s easier to be tempted. And you succumb to your sweet sin.
Make it systematically impossible to fail
Especially at the end of the day, our aptitude to make new decisions is harder. We have a limited amount of will power left.
One way to solve that, is by making it impossible to fail.
If you like a little too much Coca Cola or Chocolate, don’t buy it. Leave out of the house the junk food.
You don’t want to eat bad carbs, stop buying pasta, rice, white bread etc.
You don’t want to eat sugar: stop buying candies, sodas, cookies, biscuits, snacks, etc.
You don’t want to watch TV: give it away.
By not inviting the devil in the house, you won’t be able to succumb to it.
If it is impossible to remove it, make it harder to do it
Sometimes, you can’t completely remove the object or the source of bad habit from the house. You should then make it harder for you to use that object or access that source of bad habit.
If you can’t manage to give your TV away, just leave it unplugged or without batteries in the remote. You’ll have to stand up, go to the TV, plug it to the wall, and put the batteries in the remote. By then, you might have considered using your time in a more productive way.
If you watch too much TV in the bedroom, move it to the living room.
By sticking to these principles, you’ll be on a streak without habits in no time.
So what is the bad habit you want to get rid of most? What can you do it make it impossible or harder to do it?