​Paddy has been writing quite a bit about habit formation lately. Here is an excerpt from his latest article on our membership site. It provides some useful insights...

 

The key to habit formation is repetition. As you have seen previously (sic), it can take an extremely long time to truly nail down a habit and actually make it habitual. If you aren’t adherent to the habit, you will constantly have to get back into the rhythm of it. That isn’t to say that if you don’t perform that habit one day, or you fall off the wagon for a day or two, that you might as well give up because you are starting from ground zero. Not at all. Your brain doesn’t just completely rewire itself overnight and forget about that habit you have been working on, but at the same time, when people get out of a habit, they do often times have a hard time getting back into it. This is especially true if that habit hasn’t become fully habitual, or you fall off the wagon for a few days.

 

So, how can we make it easier to stay on track with everything?

Well, we can take advantage of the need to track how adherent we are, along with tracking a streak. This is something that lots of social media apps have used to ensure you stay on their platform and continue to keep logging in. Humans just hate losing streaks, especially win streaks. If you know you have been communicating daily with a friend, and you have a 200 day streak, you bet you are going to log in to that app and communicate again the next day so you keep that streak alive. As I mentioned earlier (sic), this is a common practice within the addiction world, and to some extent it is also present in the fitness world.

 

Arguably the most used calorie tracking app, myfitnesspal, has a streak counter and will let you know how many days in a row you have logged in and tracked your food. There are also countless other apps that you can use to track a streak, and one that I have used with great success is Momentum, but there are many others.

 

However, you don’t need an app to track for you, although it does it incredibly easily, and you can go the old fashioned route and just mark the days off on a calendar. If you are going to do that, don’t just put an X through them, you want to actively count the days you have been adherent, as it is very easy to forget about a day a few weeks ago where you weren’t adherent. Whereas if you are actively counting the days, you going back to zero is often enough of a deterrent to stop you from breaking the habit streak. Obviously this is heavily dependent on you not lying, and honestly, I don’t see why you would, as you would only be lying to yourself.

 

Of course, I am sure you can find many individuals who use their tracking adherence as some sort of social validation and post pictures of their myfitnesspal streak to show how hardcore they are, despite not actually tracking their food outside of logging in and arbitrarily tracking a random food. But that doesn’t actually help you reach your health and fitness goals, so I don’t really understand why they do it. But either way, you have to be honest in your tracking for this to work.

 

...and that, my friends, is some valuable advice from Paddy. If you would like to read something to give you a bit of a shoe up the ass, why not check out our recent blog post on Living Your Best Life. We also have some other articles on goal setting that you might like, such as this one.

 

One more thing. Next week, we will be updating the programming for our Group Coaching clients. If you were thinking of hopping on board, now would be a super time. If you have any questions about the service, just ask. 

 

Kind Regards,