Forming Healthy Habits

Why is it so hard to break old, unhealthy habits and form new, healthy ones? If we want a good, long, healthy life, it is necessary for us to build healthy habits into our lifestyles. Little adjustments to our daily routines can make huge changes to our health and well-being. These little changes seem simple and easy when we are motivated and have a plan for how we want to live our lives. But they are often WAY more difficult to implement long term than we anticipated.

The reason for this is that our bodies are incredibly good at being efficient by forming patterns that become automatic. We do things without even thinking about it. Often we aren’t even aware we did that bad habit until it’s already done. Changing this automatic pattern takes awareness, energy, and concentration. In order to rewrite that neural pathway we have to consciously choose the healthy habit every single time we would have chosen the unhealthy one. We have to do this over and over and over until it forms a new pattern and sticks. This is true for our thought patterns, movement patterns, lifestyle habits, etc. even down to the way we speak or the words we use.

In a lot of areas of life this ability to form automatic patterns is extremely helpful and serves us well, but when it comes to creating new ways of being it requires a lot of energy. This is also the reason we usually fall off course when we are sleep deprived or stressed. There simply isn’t enough energy to go towards rewriting our patterns. All this is to say, resting, practicing self care and being compassionate towards ourselves can make a HUGE impact on our success in forming new healthy habits.