Healthy Habits to Meet Your Needs

Healthy Habits to Meet Your Needs

We have a complex system of routines and rituals that we do every day without much thought or effort. This is good, because if each day required tremendous mental energy just to get through the basics, we’d never accomplish anything. However, the trouble with this is that some of our habits and rituals aren’t beneficial to our health. It could be staying up too late looking at a phone or computer screen, late night bingeing or aggressive couch sitting. The more we follow these unhealthy routines and rituals, the further ingrained they are into our minds they become.

So how do we fix it?

Ultimately we need to do two things:

  1. Understand what need our bad habit meets
  2. Introduce a similar, healthy habit that meets the same need

good habits

Bad habits fulfill real needs that we have. Often, we make the mistake of thinking that ‘vegging’ out is entirely bad when really, it’s more about how we ‘veg’ out. So we may make a change to our routine that leaves a need unfilled, and that’s when the bad habit seems to come roaring back, because it was actually meeting our need. So we need a habit change that provides the same benefit, while being healthier.

It doesn’t always have to be a fitness related change either. For instance, we could avoid eating the cookie when we realize that our real goal is to socialize with a friend. So then, the focus is on how to work socializing more prominently into the day. This isn’t always easy to identify. Depending on the time of day, we might just be hungry or maybe we’re just bored, so cookies and socializing fulfill the same need. As a nutrition coach, I need to make sure that I don’t recommend that a client snacks on some vegetables when, as healthy as they are, they don’t even remotely address the need my client is really expressing.

The longer we go without our bad habits, the weaker they get because the actual connections in our brains related to that habit decrease. The more we stick with our healthy habits, the stronger those connections get in our brain and it takes less and less effort each time to do them. It’s generally thought to take about two months to solidify a new habit into our lives, which can give us hope while also letting us prepare for it to take as long as necessary.

It’s easy to say, “Instead of doing X, go to the gym” or “Instead of eating that, just eat a pound of this vegetable,” but it’s not helpful. If we don’t validate and address our true needs in life, then we won’t be able to make effective change. Your needs are valid. And I encourage you to be honest with yourself about what your needs are, and if there is a better way to meet them.

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