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Why is change so hard for us? Here are 6 reasons:
We are motivated by the negative rather than the positive
This study found that negative emotions like fear and regret were the least effective catalysts for change. Always try and frame any change you want to make in a positive light. “I'm getting so fat and ugly” needs to be turned into “I want to become a strong, healthy person who can keep up with my kids and lives a long healthy life”.
"All or nothing" thinking
Also known as "charging in expecting to change everything at once", and then assuming you can't do it when you fail. Because of our cognitive biases, this attaches us to a no-win situation and puts a whole bunch of pressure on us. Sooner or later we will have an off day or an off week, and then we are right back to where we started, because we put so much pressure on ourselves in the first place.
We go too big and too vague
“I'm going to start exercising” is big and it's vague. What kind of exercise? What is our eventual goal? What smaller goals are we going to hit on the way? We need to be more specific. This study discusses the many problems with going too big and vague. We need to set performance targets. If we are very unfit we might consider starting with a 20 minute walk every day, and then build on from there. If we have a basic level of fitness, something like a couch to 5k might be something to look at. You want to break down your goal into “mouthfuls”...lots of little goals leading up to the big one.
We fail to research
Whatever our goal is you can guarantee a million people have done it before us and recorded it. One of my massive goals goals is to do a week long hike/camp with my dog, I pretty much have no hiking experience. Things I might consider researching include what equipment I'm going to need and how long it will last, how to walk effectively to cover more ground and protect my joints, what sort of fitness regime I'm going to need to get fit to do the hike, what sort of smaller hikes I need to consider doing, where I can safely camp etc etc. I also have problems to solve before like what kind of food is best to carry for my dog, what kind of first aid should I know, what pitfalls might there be? Instead of just jumping right in, spend some time researching and solving potential problems before you start. The internet is an incredible tool!
Trying to change too much in one go
I lovingly call this “Bridget Jones Syndrome”. I'm going to lose 20lbs, find a man, give up smoking and booze all at the same time. It is much, much easier to tackle one goal at a time. Often you will find goals intersect. For me, meditation is an integral part of my health routine as well as my spiritual one because it keeps me focussed and controls my anxiety...if I let that get out of control it can pretty much ruin all of my healthy habits. We need attention, self control and motivation to make changes in our lives. Spreading these natural resources of ours too thin can stop us progressing.
We think failure is the be all and end all
We all fall. Whether we choose to get back up or stay on the ground is our choice. Try to avoid absolutism. Failure is part of the process and can be invaluable to us because we learn what doesn't work and how to avoid it next time. We can notice the patterns in our behaviour and circumstances when we fail, and how to best avoid them in future.
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How I implement change in my life as the biggest procrastinator on the planet
I have been looking back at my health journey over the last year. I still have a bit of weight to lose, but I am overall happy with the way I am eating and generally living. It's just a shame that I didn't get here earlier and I was wondering what it was that prevented me from getting here sooner.
I have been one of these people that tries to overhaul my entire life every 1st of the month, every Monday, every New Years day. You know the type of thinking....tomorrow I'm going to give up caffeine, sugar and alcohol, exercise for an hour a day and solve world peace by lunchtime. I don't only do this with health related stuff but also spiritual stuff. Meditation is another habit I have struggled to build into a daily routine and I would keep setting these goals to all of a sudden start doing 30 minute meditations twice a day.
I know a lot of people do change in this manner, and I honestly wish I was one of those people. You get people who wake up, are fed up with their life and make enormous changes overnight. I am deeply envious of those people and I wish more of us were like that. I think society would be a much better place if we were all capable of waking up one day and becoming healthier, becoming more productive, becoming more of whatever it is that we wanted to be.
Unfortunately, for a lot of us just deciding to make massive changes isn't going to work because there is years of psychological conditioning encouraging us to keep acting the exact way we are acting. Unless we are wealthy enough to hire a life coach, chances are we are going to slump right back into our old habits, whether that is smoking, cupcakes or beer.
For the rest of us, we need to build new habits into our lives slowly and this is going to take time. And that is OK. We can often be put off by how much time it is going to take us to make a positive change in our lives, forgetting that if we don't start now the date we achieve that lofty goal is even further into the future. You don't need to be sidelined by the people that say that your goals aren't big enough. Breaking goals into chunks is a very viable way of doing things and it's more achievable for most of us than making massive overnight changes.
Another thing that may help us is to realise that it's easier to start a new habit than to cease an old one. For example, if the goal is to stop eating junk food, that will be harder to achieve than adding more servings of vegetables into our diet. In this case, if we choose to add a couple of servings of veggies on top of what we typically eat, and we increase our goal number of healthy servings week by week, eventually that unhealthy food will slowly get crowded out.
If the goal is meditation, there are actually one minute meditations you can start with on Youtube. A lot of seasoned meditators might call that completely pointless, but with our distracted modern world, many of us cannot focus on our breath or even a whole minute, so a minute is an ideal place to start.
If you are one of these “overnight changers”, I salute you and I'm bloody jealous. For everybody else, if you have a habit you are desperate to implement and you keep failing at it, try breaking it down into implements. This way “eat more healthy” turns into several smaller goals such as:
Drink x amount of water in the day
Add x amount of veggies to my daily diet
Replace my morning snack with something healthier
and so on and so forth. Progress can be frustratingly slow but even a month will make a difference and six months down the line you can look back and find you have actually made massive progress towards changing your life. If you're a superb goal setter and achiever already, this advice will be worse than useless for you. But there are so many people out there like me struggling to achieve their goals. My advice is if you keep starting something on Monday and giving it up on Thursday, look at your goal and see how much you can break it down into tiny chunks that fool your brain into thinking you are making no change at all. And as ridiculously small as this change seems to you, if you keep on track with it, you will create lasting changes that can change your life for good. It may take you longer but it is infinitely better than spinning your wheels in place.
Sneak up on that procrastinating habit by adding in changes so small it's suckered into thinking you are just half assing it. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go and take my own advice.
