Who didn’t ever make a New Years’ resolution to start running, eat healthier, stop smoking or drinking, cut back on sugar and wheat, meditate, or even just regularly floss your teeth? Right? And how many of us actually kept that resolution and made it into a proper habit for a lifetime? Right, count me in on that failure, more than once!
Healthy habits….you hear these words so often, and usually they produce a little pang of guilt in us……We know we should create a few more of them, or we have tried them on and then dropped out of the habit before it stuck.
I will talk about how to start new habits in another post. Here we are just going to look into how we can motivate ourselves to even start and then keep that motivation. The very first steps……
First of all ask yourself how motivated you are to take on this challenge of creating a new habit (yes we are making a big deal of it, because it often seems to be so difficult for people to just do it, so let’s get to the bottom of all its aspects). Your motivation is what it all starts with.
You do not want to try and create a healthy habit just because everybody else is raving about it (fads blow over, people drop out, and then who is going to motivate you?), because your mom has always said that you should eat your vegetables (your mom probably doesn’t live with you anymore to kick your butt every day) or because Oprah talked about it. These are some of the worst motivators you can come up with, because they are factors outside of yourself.
You can only create a new habit when you and only you are completely convinced that it is going to make you feel better, physically and mentally.
Without that motivation, it is going to be very hard to create a new habit. So make sure that you know everything about it that there is to know: what exactly will it do to and for your body? Is that what your body really needs? How often do you have to do it for the optimal results? Do you have that much time? How soon will you notice a difference? What possible side-effects or difficulties might you encounter? Are there any contra-indications? How much money will it cost you? Do you need special equipment? Are there certain brands that are better than others? And once you have all these facts clear, there is a couple more questions that you have to ask yourself:
How difficult will I find it to start this and do this every day/every week?
And why?
First and for all you have to win the argument with your lazy ego, that rather stays at home watching tv. Ego doesn’t want to give up its spot in the centre of your comfort zone. Lend your resisting ego a willing ear for a moment, and notice all the arguments against your plan that it comes up with (there will be many!). Maybe you can write the long list on a piece of paper, stare them down for a while in silent battle and then just burn the paper. Or take some time to think about all these arguments, and then give reason a chance to come up not only with a whole bunch of strong counter-arguments in favour of your new habit but also a bunch of simple solutions for all of ego’s major problems with it. Ego’s resistance is just based on a fear of change. And wasn’t it change that you were looking for in the first place? If you still have the feeling that you will fail at starting and keeping up your new habit, you will. The power of thought is so strong, that whatever you think will become a belief that will grow an attitude that produces a behaviour which will be the not-doing of your new habit. So make sure that you change your ego’s mind, convincing it that you will be successful. Then you will.
Now you finally have your motivation in place: you know exactly why you want to create this healthy habit, what you need to implement it, and are convinced that you want to do it and will do it for the rest of your life. It is meant to improve your physical and/or mental well-being. Let us look at that mental and emotional aspect a little closer. What does actually happen to you, when you start to make one small healthy change in your life?
First of all, there is a boost of confidence and feeling achieved, because hey, you’re keeping a promise to yourself, and you’re keeping up this healthy habit!
A for effort!
You may not really notice any physical changes yet, but pat yourself on the shoulder anyway for showing up every day! You worked through the phase of fear and resistance and are doing it! Again: the power of thought!
If you happen to be stuck in a rut in your life, in whichever way, taking this first little step of creating a new habit that is good for you and keeping it up could well become the seed of change for some of the bigger stuff like changing jobs or ending a suffocating relationship.
Apart from this confidence boost that can get you kickstarted into creating more change, there is a much more subtle, but sometimes even more important emotional effect to keeping up a healthy habit: the message that you are sending to your body, and to your self: ‘I am making time for you and taking care of you, I love you enough to do something that will make you feel better, and I will do this for you every day’.
Basically you are saying to yourself: ‘I am worthy of love. I LOVE MYSELF’.
Wow. That is quite the powerful message. I bet there are plenty of you out there that do not really say that to themselves very often. And by becoming aware of this gesture of self-love that you are making every day, your practice gets exponentially more powerful! Loving yourself is where happiness begins.
Once you get into the swing of a healthy habit, the mental impact is just as powerful for your general well-being as the actual lowered blood pressure or the better digestion. That’s what I would call a great motivator! Put that one at the top of your list: “I want to create this healthy habit because I love myself”. Now go make your New Year’s resolution(s), and make them happen. Happy New Year!
PS: if you write your New year’s resolutions in the comments below, it will give you some extra accountability-support! (I promised on Facebook that I was going to make this website and start a blog, and I definitely felt more motivated to keep my promise once I had made it public!)
Until then nobody has any idea what they will be doing on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, apart from those that have jobs in the restaurants, because they of course will be working. But none of us has made any plans for a Christmas dinner or full-blown Christmas party. No fancy invitations have been sent, no heads broken over 10-course dinners. Island dinners can never be very elaborate anyway, because of the major lack of fancy ingredients to be found in the shops. No-one has been spending a fortune buying gifts and wrapping them, because there is not a whole lot to buy in our handful of general stores, and there is no brain-washing through non-stop advertising that makes you want to buy all that Christmas-stuff. Christmas cards cannot be sent for lack of postal services here, so that one is easy too. Basically, the almost complete absence of forceful marketing publicity makes Christmas on a little island so much more relaxed.
Anything goes. Combs, flip-flops, tooth brushes, bottle caps, broken USB cables or egg timers, cups, ice cream tubs, and one year even the derrière of a mannequin and a biker’s helmet have made it into our Christmas tree. The result is a very messy, but super-merry Christmas tree, that has no pretensions to be fancy or fashionable, just pure fun. The best part of this whole happening in my opinion is the opportunity for all of us to do something different and to express some creativity, because we don’t get that chance often enough. The absence of prefabricated examples stimulates the children’s imagination, and they start to create from scratch, stringing a few bottle caps together with a tooth brush in between and all of a sudden it’s a doggie! They work together, sharing their ‘trashures’, helping each other to cut string or poke holes. And then one of the littlest ones collects a whole set of bottle caps, lids, some plastic jars and a little spoon and starts cooking up a storm in her little improvised kitchen, and afterwards she puts all the dishes neatly away and wipes of her counter. No need for an expensive fancy toys-‘r-us-stove with a set of matching pots and pans, just some trash and a handful of sand was enough to spark her imagination to create her own complete kitchen. 
