How to Build Healthy Habits in 5 Steps
If you want to make adjustments in order to live a healthier life, you’ve come to the right place. Here are 5 steps that will help you build healthy habits. Happy habit building!
The Gap Between Knowing Better and Doing Better
There is a period, the time of which is different for everyone, where a gap exists between knowing better and doing better. It is when you have taken the step of becoming self-aware of what habits are no longer serving you, or are hindering you from enjoying your life, however you find yourself continuing to fall into the same unhealthy patterns nonetheless.
Our tendency to fall back into what’s familiar, even if it’s not what’s best for us is why it’s imperative to make healthy coping habits part of your daily routine. Don’t solely keep healthy habits in your back pocket for when life gets hard. Practice them and strengthen them. This will reinforce the positive consequences of their use. The more practice you have, the more familiar these habits will become. The more familiar the healthy habit, especially when times get rough, the more likely you will turn to it instead of a destructive habit.
Your Obstacles
Your obstacles build a confidence and assurance in yourself. They are opportunities to learn, grow, and experience more. To get to know yourself and this world more intimately. While in the moment we may wish we did not have to go through the hard stuff, the hard stuff is what makes us strong. It doesn’t mean you won’t falter, but it does mean that when it comes down to it-when it matters, your inner strength will be there. Because after everything you’ve been through you know two things: 1. Only you can decide what breaks you and 2. You may fall, you may stay down for a little and you’ll always get up.
Go Out of the Way for Yourself
We go out of the way for the people we love. It’s often how we show them we love and support them. We make extravagant homemade dinners for our families, we pick out the perfect presents for our friends, we buy bagels for our meetings …
The Truth about Happiness
Challenge: make a list of the times you have felt genuinely happy or at peace. This list will remind you that your happiness never came from things looking seemingly perfect on the outside. Your happiness came from being present and open and connected to yourself …
Sink Into the Good
Everything in life is temporary. So when you feel content and satisfied, ground yourself in that feeling. If you’re used to chaos it can be tempting to focus on if or when things may go wrong. Worrying about all the ways your peace can be …
Diminishing Returns
Do you find yourself wondering if a particular habit you’ve developed is one you should keep in your life? The concept of diminishing returns is that proportionally smaller benefits or profits are derived as more money or energy is invested. Smoking is an example of …
A mind blowing singular breakthrough is not what changes your life. A micro shift is.
Small continuous actions are what lead to monumental changes. Consistent actions towards your goals are what lead to sustainable and long term change. Although, we would all like to have a huge “ah-ha” moment where everything clicks into place, this is rarely what happens.
The moments where we feel like things are clicking are created by the 1,000 small moments that came before it. The big moments are
Having Trouble Focusing? Look at What You’re Consuming
You have to commit to your goals; you have to consistently work on them. If you find yourself having a hard time staying on track and focused then take an audit of the things you’re consuming.
Whenever I find myself in a lull, or like I’m “stuck”, I take inventory of the things I’m consuming. I can usually pinpoint where my energy is being used up in places where I’d prefer it to be going towards other things.
Energy and focus are finite resources. At some point during the day, they’re going to run out. When we want to evolve, it’s important we use our energy and our ability to focus to create things we want to and not let it dwindle away.
If you have goals but find yourself struggling to execute, sit down and take an honest look at what you’re consuming. This includes social media, television, people, text messages, family members, gossip, the news. All of it. Where are you putting your energy?
7 Ways to Combat Feeling Overwhelmed This Holiday Season
The holidays are a joyful time of year for many but it can also be overwhelming. It’s the season of more. Many times that’s more love, more yummy food, more warmth, more family, more rest. But it’s also more money spent, more parties to attend, more cooking to be done, more conversations to be had, more expectations you want to meet. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and drained it doesn’t mean you’re a grinch, it means you’re human. It’s normal and it happens.
If you are able to step away this holiday season without it having the adverse effect of making you more stressed once it’s time to step back in, that’s great. Keep doing that. But if you find your stepping away is creating more stress than perhaps it’s doing more harm than good. Here’s 7 tips to combat overwhelm this holiday season.