Healthy Resolutions : Building Healthy Habits

With the New Year here, you’re likely considering making a healthy resolution towards new and improved healthy habits. If so, congratulations! You’ve taken the first step to successfully developing a healthy habit; the decision to do so.

Building healthy habits, cannot stop there, however. Instead, it will require further action, taking time, planning, discipline, and commitment.

In what follows, we’ll be discussing the importance of habits. More importantly, however, we’ll share how to create a lasting habit so that you can enter the new year prepared and positioned for success.

The Importance of Healthy Habits

While we may not be consciously aware, our lives are made up of a composition of habits that constitute our health and wellness. The importance of healthy habits, then, is essential to the quality of our lives.

Whether it’s committing to a healthy diet, starting an exercise regimen, drinking more water, or quitting destructive habits, the importance of doing these things is undeniable. In addition, discontinuing an unhealthy habit or implementing a good healthy habit could be the difference between life or death depending on the habit in question.

The most important characteristic of a habit is that it gets stronger with time. In other words, the longer you commit to a habit, the easier it gets and the more impactful it becomes.

How to Create Lasting Healthy Habits

Similar to breaking a bad habit, building lasting healthy habits take time. In fact, they say it takes 63 days to turn an action into a habit. Yet, by deciding on what you want to change and committing to the process wholeheartedly, the time it takes to reach the goal should be irrelevant.

Once you’ve decided to commit to your goal of achieving a particular habit, it’s now time to begin. Remember that the key to any healthy habit is sustainability and longevity.

Some helpful tips for creating a lasting healthy habit.

Start Small

Too often, people set grandiose goals at the beginning, failing to understand what it truly takes to achieve such goals. The typical result is failure. Instead, it’s best to set smaller goals, make smaller changes, and stack one small healthy habit on top of the other.

Track & Measure Progress

Tracking and measuring your progress isn’t only a means of analysis but also a tool for accountability and motivation. If you’re trying to drink 2 gallons of water every day, for example, track each day you were successful. A true measure of progress, such as doing this for seven days in a row, will be very encouraging and help to maintain your motivation. But, on the contrary, it will hold you accountable when you miss a day or two.

Celebrate the Small Wins

One of the keys to successfully creating healthy habits is being able to look forward to rewards. For example, if you celebrate the win of getting through just one day where you have implemented a healthy habit, you can build on this and do it again. The journey isn’t always easy, and these kinds of rewards can be so helpful for your progression.

The following are excellent healthy habits to consider as a true resolution 2023 :

• Eliminate sugar from your diet
• Exercise regularly
• Drink more water
• Take the stairs instead of the elevator
• Eat vegetables with every meal
• Cut down on alcohol consumption
• Take the bike instead of the bus
• Go to bed earlier; wake up earlier

Whatever you decide to pursue, make sure that it’s worth pursuing for YOU and no one else. It’s really difficult to do things for others when you don’t really want to do those things for yourself. To get a new habit to stick, you must also want it for yourself.