The Four Pillars for Healthy Living — Habits
Hi there, and welcome to Rich-Life. This post is the first part of a four-part series — The Four Pillars for Healthy Living. In this series, you’ll discover the four pillars that will lead you to a fitter, healthier life — together; we’ll cover off each pillar in detail, so let’s get started.
The four pillars for healthy living consist of:
- Habits
- Nutrition
- Exercise
- Self Development
If you don’t have a clear understanding of how you manage each of the four pillars for healthy living, then you can undoubtedly find some improvements to make.
Habits
The first pillar for healthy living is your collection of habits. Habits underpin the remaining three pillars and play a significant role in whether you get the most out of them or not. With this in mind, we’ll focus on habits in this first installment.
Habits are the small building blocks of behaviour that makeup who we are. We each have formed many habits over the years without even thinking about them. When we get up and brush our teeth or shower each morning; when and how you have your coffee or the fact that you put your keys in the same place when you get home from work.
We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
- Aristotle
When it comes to your current lifestyle; you could think about the habitual snacking that you indulge in, or, on the flip side, the fact that you regularly go to the gym or go running three times a week.
From your current habits, you can see how you currently find yourself in the position that you’re in — whether you’re fit and healthy, or overweight and a touch on the unhealthy side — it all comes down to the habits that you have developed.
How do you form habits?
Many of your habits are completely automatic. This means that you’ve done them so many times that you no longer think about them. This is a great thing when it comes to good habits — it’s a terrible thing when it comes to bad habits! You may see such habits described as “unconscious habits” or “automatic habits”.
As you start to form a new habit, your brain starts to build connections linked to the habit known as neural pathways. Neural pathways help in the execution of the habit. With high frequency and repetition, these pathways become stronger and more defined. The development of these neural pathways determines whether or not you are going to form an automatic habit or give up on it. The reason why long-lasting bad habits are so difficult to give up is that you’ve been doing them for so long, they have strong and defined pathways which are not easy to break down.
Doing something twice a day, every day, is far more likely to become an unconscious habit when compared to doing something once a week.
People often ask — “how long must I do something before it becomes a habit?” — unfortunately, this is the wrong question to ask. What you should be asking is “how many times and how often must I do something before it becomes a habit?”. Doing something twice a day, every day, is far more likely to become an unconscious habit when compared to doing something once a week.
If you’re already starting to form new habits but need a bit of accountability to keep up with them, then take a look at my accountability blog post to see how being accountable to others can help you stick to your habits.
How to start a new habit
The most important part of starting a new habit is to start small. People often jump straight into significant and bold changes, that they simply can’t handle. Start with a little change and build on it over time.
Small changes can lead to some really big improvements over time. For example: if you’re looking to increase your level of physical activity, you could start by committing to a walk around the block each morning.
In this case, walking around the block is the minimum commitment. However, before long, you’ll find yourself doing it twice or branching out on to a longer route. It may not sound like much activity, but when you look at the bigger picture, over weeks, months, or even years, it all adds up.
In Atomic Habits by James Clear, James talks about the 4 laws of creating new habits. Each one can probably be a blog post in its own right so I’ll keep it simple for now.
For a brief visual overview of Atomic Habits — checkout my Atomic Habits mind map below.
Law 1 — Make it obvious
The first law of creating new habits is to make it obvious. I know what you’re thinking — sounds obvious! However, people often don’t make their new habits obvious enough.
Habit stacking
One way to make a habit apparent is habit stacking. Habit stacking basically involves piggybacking on a pre-existing habit which makes it so much easier to remember to do it.
For more on habits and habit stacking, take a look at my habit stacking YouTube video.
If you want to make your habit obvious then make it visible.
Our brains don’t like to work; they would like an easy ride. For example: if you want to eat more fruit during your day, it won’t happen if it’s tucked away in the fridge.
With this in mind, If you’re serious about eating more fruit — make it obvious! To achieve this, place your fruit smack, bang and centre in the middle of the dining room table. Better yet, have multiple fruit bowls in easily accessible and visible places around the house.
Law 2 — Make it attractive
The second law of creating new habits is to make it attractive. This is very individualistic, but nobody knows better than you, what you find attractive.
Temptation bundling
My experience of making a habit attractive came in the form of temptation bundling. In essence, this is doing something you want to do while doing the habit that you think you should do.
If you prefer to watch and listen, take a look at my Temptation Bundling video.
In my case, the habit was walking. I’m not a massive fan of walking, but I wanted to integrate it into my routine. I love to listen to audible books and podcasts, so I bundled this with my walk. I listen to an audible book while walking and because I enjoy the book so much, I don’t even think about the walk. This makes me far more likely to carry on my new habit because now I intrinsically link an attractive experience with it.
Taking this a little further, now when I think about listening to my audible books, I also think about taking a walk — so this now works both ways.
Law 3 — Make it easy
The third law of creating new habits is to make it easy. There are many ways you can go about this, but the simplest way is to start with the two-minute rule.
The two-minute rule
If you fail at implementing the two-minute rule, it could be that your habit is too challenging…
The two-minute rule suggests that you make your habit so easy that it only takes two minutes. This is a minimum commitment, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do longer but you should at least commit to two minutes.
If you fail at implementing the two-minute rule, it could be that your habit is too challenging, and you may need to work at making it more manageable. After all, if you can’t stick to it for two minutes, what chance have you got in sticking to it long term?
Law 4 — Make it satisfying
The fourth law of creating habits is to make it satisfying. Making your habit satisfying should be easy; it merely means rewarding yourself when you complete your habit.
You’re in charge of how you reward yourself, but I would recommend matching the reward with the size of the achievement. Booking yourself a holiday in the sun for completing your first set of 10 press-ups is probably a little over the top!
Rewarding yourself with a slightly bigger prize for achieving a habit streak should be considered though. Rewarding yourself for a habit streak can help you keep going when you’re not quite feeling it.
In addition to this, visually tracking your habit streak can often serve as a small reward in its self. Merely being able to see your progress and how well you’re doing can be very satisfying and often helps to keep you motivated to keep your streak going.
Final thoughts
You’ve just discovered the first of four pillars for healthy living — habits.
Habits feature in everything you do, so having a strategy for forming good habits and breaking bad habits is essential for healthy living.
Use the four laws above to help you develop new habits and consider the inversion of these laws to break bad habits. For more on habits, take a look at Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Be sure to follow me so that you don’t miss part two of The Four Pillars For Healthy Living — Nutrition.
Thanks for stopping by, see you next time.
If you’re interested, you can find more from me over at https://www.rich-life.co.uk/
Originally published at https://www.rich-life.co.uk on July 5, 2020.
