The power of habits

Did you start the New Year with any resolutions? A decision to turn over a new leaf, and focus on some aspect of your health and wellbeing? For many people, it’s a decision to exercise more, reduce the amount of alcohol or junk food and try to stay healthy. For some it might have even been a new focus on their mental health and wellbeing.

If you were one of those people – how are you going? Have you been able to stick those resolutions, or did they fall along the wayside as life events took over?

Habits can be both a blessing and a curse, because good habits help you to rise up over time, while bad habits can send you into a downward spiral.

One of the keys to maintaining good habits is remembering that it’s not just about willpower. There are lots of little things that can help to make or break your new healthy habit formation. The environment that you are in can help to nurture a good habit that you want to stick with, but it can also make it easy for you to slip into bad habits like over-eating snack foods or binge-watching television shows.

In his book Atomic Habits James Clear distinguishes between goals and systems. Goals are the results you are trying to achieve – losing weight or reading more books. Systems, on the other hand, are the processes that you put in place that lead to achieving those results. If you focus only on the goal, and not the system, then you are more likely to fail in achieving that goal.

This applies as much to resolutions as it does to any area of your life. Setting up systems to make new habits easy. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Set aside dedicated time for your new habit so that it becomes part of your normal routine, rather than something that you have to squeeze in.

And if you fall off the resolution bus, that’s OK. The most important thing is to jump back on and give it another go. Not all habits stick straight away.