Check out this awesome advice from Leo Babauta on what you MUST do to change your habits:
Make Your Habit Change a Priority
One thing I like to say to friends who stumble in their habit changes is “Life gets in the way.”
And it undoubtedly does. Emergencies come up, work gets crazy and hectic, vacations happen, routines change, priorities change. Habits become less of a priority when many of these things happen, and often it’s enough of a change in priority for the habit to die altogether.
But don’t let that happen without a fight.
Make your habit change a top priority in your life, or it will likely fail.
If you want to make exercise a new habit, for example, but you let other priorities push the exercise back and back until you just decide not to do it for today, you’re going to fail.
If instead, you do the exercise first, because it’s important to you, and let the other stuff (including work) come after the exercise, then you’ll likely succeed.
This is one of the reasons it’s important to do just one habit change at a time — you can’t have very many priorities in your life. It just doesn’t work that way. At any given time, only one or two things is really important to you.
If you want the habit to stick, the change to actually last, you’ll need to make the habit change one of those really important things. That means, every day, you wake up thinking about how you’re going to make it work today. It means every day, you really want to not only get it done, but to log it and let others know how you succeeded.
Every day, your habit change needs to be the top thing you do. When you go on vacation, it should still be your priority. When your work gets intense, it can’t fall by the wayside, but you need to figure out how you’re going to make the work fit in around the habit. When your routine changes, you need to figure out how the routine will work around the habit.
Don’t let the habit be a lower priority.
We can learn two very important lessons from Leo that will help healthy change become a reality. First of all, choose only ONE habit to change at a time. This is the exact same reason that I have my personal training clients focus on mastering small dietary changes, one at a time, instead of trying to change everything all at once. Small positives habits, mastered, then built upon, can lead to very impressive changes over (relatively) short amounts of time. Just imagine that you focused on eating fruits and vegetables at every meal for one month and then on incorporating lean proteins at every meal for the next month, then on only drinking water, tea, black coffee for one month. Each of these changes, in and of themselves, are small enough to be very unintimidating. If I asked most people if they were to focus EXCLUSIVELY on being sure that there were fruits and/or veggies on their plate every time they prepared a meal, most of them would feel pretty confident that they could do it. The more you do it, the more habitual it will become. Eventually you won’t even have to think about it…and that’s when you add in the next habit. Just think, if you master just ONE habit a month for six months, you can completely change your body. How do I know? Because I see my clients do it all the time. These are the exact same principles that I used with Liz to achieve the following transformation in just five months (click on the photos for a closer view):
When trying to improve your habits, start small, start with something you KNOW you can do, use your success with that habit to build your confidence and then move on to the next thing. But remember to keep it simple…ONE thing at at time.
