Yesterday, I had to have a bit of a heart-to-heart with myself. I need to do this every now and then when my eating or exercise or spiritual habits fall by the wayside. It's generally a somewhat insidious process, in which several weeks (or months) go by, and I realize one day that instead of eating kale and cucumbers, I'm subsisting mostly on Oreos and haven't run in about a month.
Now, I don't necessarily think that having an Oreo now and then is a cardinal sin, or that everybody has to be a marathon runner in order to be successful; it's just that these are the habits of eating and moving that slow trial and error have proven are effective at helping me stay healthy and at peace with myself. I've talked a little about this recently in this space when discussing insomnia, but today I just want to discuss habits in general.
The thing about habits is that they don't stay in place all by themselves. They are prone at certain times (stressful ones, for example) to fraying at the edges, or even to unraveling altogether. "I'm too tired to run today," I might say. "It's been a long week, and I'm exhausted -- I don't have time to cook anything healthy."
The paradox here, of course, is that the more I engage these types of thoughts, the less time I spend on my habits, and the more that happens, the more I find that I am tired all of the time, irritable, and depressed.
So how to get back into the swing of habitual living? Many people have written about this, about how to start a new habit and how to get back into habits once you've abandoned them, and I'm no expert on motivation in and of itself, so please don't think I'm claiming to be the final authority on this.
Yet this is a road I've walked many times in my life, and this is a topic I discuss with patients all of the time when it comes to making healthy food choices, exercising, or being mindful, and the approach I take in these situations seems to help, so I'll share it here.
First, I'm a huge proponent of the "start small" approach. Nobody (effectively) jumps immediately to running all 26 miles of a marathon if they've never so much as successfully run a 5K. You start with running a mile at a time, then slowly build on that over months until you can work your way up to your goal.
That's the approach I recommend for starting or restarting a habit. If you want to overhaul your diet, maybe pick one thing to replace each week, or add a vegetable to every meal. If you've never exercised regularly, start with just walking 20 minutes a day. Make it something almost embarrassingly easy and give yourself this opportunity to succeed because each success builds on the next, and you need those wins to keep you going.
Second, try to pick something you like. There's no point in training for that marathon if you violently hate running, or in replacing your afternoon milkshake with a kale smoothie if you would cheerfully dump the world's supply of kale into a volcano at the first opportunity. Instead, if you enjoy being in the woods or mountains, start hiking more regularly. If you only really like two vegetables, say celery and broccoli, then give yourself free rein for a few weeks to make those the only vegetables you're eating regularly, just until you're back in the swing of things.
Finally, give yourself time. It takes time to build habits that last, and time to rebuild them when they've fallen by the wayside. Humans are creatures who like to assign blame, and if you go a week or two and aren't running five miles a day and subsisting entirely off a paleolithic diet while practicing Zen mindfulness for an hour every morning, that's okay. Every step toward building healthy habits is a positive step and movement in the right direction.
I tend to think that there are no magic bullets in life, and that's as true for habit-making as it is for anything else. Along those lines, there are many approaches to how to build or rebuild healthy habits -- these just happen to be the ones that work for me and many of my patients, and hopefully they'll do the same for some of you this week.
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Joshua Potter, D.O., is a physician with Stony Brook Southampton Hospital's Meeting House Lane Medical Practice who specializes in family and neuromusculoskeletal medicine. He oversees the practice's Shelter Island office. Opinions expressed in this column are his personal and professional views and not necessarily those of his employer.