Do you regularly recommit to health goals only to fall off the wagon days later?
Don’t beat yourself up. It’s not your fault. Health goals don’t work for most of us.
It’s a common story. We start off intending to do something. And we genuinely want to do it. But within days or weeks, if we’re lucky, we stop doing the new thing and fall back on our habits.
We can’t help it. The pull of our habits is stronger than our wants.
So what’s the answer?
The answer is to change our habits.
If you’re wondering what this has to do with your skin, let me explain.
My skin cleared when I stopped trying to clear my skin.
I had given up trying to clear my skin. I accepted what everyone told me, which was that my acne, eczema, and psoriasis were just conditions I’d have to learn to live with. Defeated, I decided to focus on becoming the healthiest version of me that I could be.
I ate more nutritious foods, I exercised consistently, and I took better care of my mental health. This is when everything started to change.
My acne cleared up, my psoriasis healed completely, and my eczema mostly stays away. But there were other changes too.
My crippling Irritable Bowel Syndrome healed, my sinuses stopping giving me problems, and I no longer suffered from frequent headaches.
That’s when I realised that my lifestyle was the key to getting and maintaining healthier skin, and it can be for you too.
If you make goals throughout the year to eat better and exercise more then great, I know that these two things will have a positive effect on the health of your skin.
But to give yourself the best chance of achieving your health goals, you need to change your habits.
Here are two straightforward techniques that can help you to change your habits.
Technique one – start small
The first technique is to commit to the smallest action possible and do it every day.
Often we fail to achieve our goals because we’re trying to do too much too soon. We get overwhelmed and can’t keep up with the unrealistic expectations we’ve put on ourselves.
By taking tiny steps, we know we can do it and do it consistently. And those tiny steps eventually lead to more tiny steps until we’re routinely doing the thing that seemed out of reach a few months earlier.
If you’re a parent, you’ll know that this technique works. It’s how our children learn to walk. By taking one tiny step, then another until they’re on their feet and running circles around us!
I did precisely this to achieve a consistent exercise routine. I committed to exercising for two minutes every single day. Those two minutes often turn into fifteen minutes. Sometimes they even turn into half an hour. That might not sound a lot, but last week I cycled 45km and walked over 70,000 steps. That’s way more exercise than I ever did when I just set myself a goal to get fit.
You can read more about building an exercise habit by clicking here.
Your small step might be to eat one vegetable with dinner, eat an apple before lunch, go to bed ten minutes earlier, or do one sit-up before going to bed.
The point is to make the action so small you have to do it. Doing something consistently is what will build your habit. Before long, you’ll stop thinking about it and will just do it.
Technique two – habit tracking
The second technique is habit tracking. Whether you like paper or electronic, find a way of tracking your progress.
I like a month-to-view habit tracking calendar. I put a tick on the days I do whatever it is I’m aiming to do. The aim is to get more ticks than blank spaces at the end of the month.
Keeping a tracker is one of the most straightforward ways of keeping yourself accountable and making the change. It’s a sticker chart for grown-ups and just works.
Download your free habit tracker here.
Ditch the goals and work on your habits instead
Give yourself permission to ditch the health goals you never stick to and instead achieve lasting change by changing your habits.
In three months’ time, will you be re-committing to the same old goal to get fit or eat better, or will you already be the happy, healthy person you deserve to be?
You’ve now got two actions:
- Pick a small step aligned with an area of your life you want to improve and do it every day.
- Decide how you’ll keep track of your new habit and start doing it.