What if exercising, eating healthy, and meditation were as easy as combing your hair or checking your email? Everyone does it. It’s an automatic response. You can learn to practice good habits because of repetition. Turn a simple practice into a habit. Of course, simple isn’t always easy.
You need to first get through the initiation phase (deciding on a new behavior). We all know that persistence is key. But what about reinforcement? There is positive and negative reinforcement. Dr. Mark Galizio, professor of psychology at University of North Carolina-Wilmington states, “People tend to confuse negative reinforcement with punishment. You can eat super healthy 6 days of the week. Yet come day 7, if you give into something sugary or fatty, it’s negative – not punitive.”
The same is true for anything where you have good intentions of changing such as:
- Turning off blue-screen technology two hours before bed
- Not just going on a diet, but making healthy eating a way of life
- Quitting smoking or drinking
- No technology at the dinner table
- Stop surrounding yourself around negative-minded friends (and family, too)
Secondly, you need to start changing your state of mind. If you tell yourself you can’t, then you won’t. Anything from not being good enough, not smart enough, not ready enough which you hear from yourself, your spouse, your leaders, and what happens? You begin to believe all these things are true. Start with the right internal dialogue and right state of mind state, which puts you closer to achieving your goal. Say to yourself, “Yes, I can do ________.” Simply, starting a practice or routine is training your brain and body to recognize the triggers (awareness), and start progressing closer to your goal (taking action).
The training starts with committing to set aside 5-minutes and build up to 10, 15, 30-minutes and then 1 hour. Everyone can spare 5-minutes! This can be applied to exercise, diet, meditation, reading, ignoring your phone, biting your nails, etc. Anything that you want to put your mind towards to improve, and it will take focus and attention. Each 5 minutes gets less complicated because you focus either on your breath (as with meditation or exercise) or a visual representation (not reaching for the cigarette for instant gratification). This level of self-control is telling the amygdala (mid-brain) to pause that desire, and redirects your control to the pre-frontal cortex (top forward part of the brain), which powers up to control that impulse. You are training the brain literally to switch from short-term awareness (instant gratification) to long-term awareness (willpower).
It’s true that the act of willpower can lead to fatigue. You will have some days or weeks when you stop your routine; the good news is that you can always begin again. As Benjamin Franklin said, “It’s easier to prevent bad habits, then to break them.”
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