Behavior-change apps, health coaching systems or other approaches that are based on assumptions that few people can meet thwart achieving your client health and well-being goals.
So, I’ll get right to the point: If we want to cultivate sustainable change in our clients’ and members’ exercise, healthy eating and other self-care choices (and why wouldn’t we?), we need to move beyond conventional thinking, pop culture and fads, and take a clear-eyed look at our assumptions.
Yes, I’m talking about habit formation.
It’s time to jump off the habit bandwagon and think more critically about the actual value of habits for helping those who depend on us create sustainable changes in complex behaviors like exercise and healthy eating.
The topic of habits couldn’t be more popular right now. The Google Trends Interest Over Time graph shows an upward trend since 2009, and online searches for “habit” this past fall reached an all-time high.
Thanks to popular bestsellers like Atomic Habits and The Power of Habit, forming automatic habits has become our cure-all for changing diet, exercise and any behavior in between. Honestly, I’m not surprised. Popular approaches to habits are touted as simple, easy and a quick corrective for anything we want to change.
But what if it isn’t true?
Pulling Back the Curtain on Habits
Successful habit formation is built upon some familiar assumptions:
- Everyone can form habits.
- The internal conflicts about eating and exercise that many commonly have do not affect their ability to form automatic habits for healthy eating and exercise.
- It’s possible to form an automatic habit for any behavior.
- The automatic, rote nature of habit is the ideal for creating lasting changes in healthy eating and exercise.
But when we pull back the curtain and examine these assumptions, we very quickly discover that when it comes to producing sustainable changes in complex behaviors like exercise and healthy eating, the power of habit isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
In fact, when you consider habit formation in light of these assumptions, you’ll see why habit formation for complex lifestyle behaviors is not the golden path to creating sustainable change for most people—especially those living complex, multi-layered lives filled with responsibilities and necessitating quick pivots achieved through conscious flexible thinking.
The truth is more people could become successful with complex health-promoting behaviors if they simply ditch habits.
If the ultimate goal is to facilitate changes in health promoting behaviors that can survive in the real world, the behavior-change strategies and programs we use with our clients and fitness members must work within the true realities of their days. Instead of “going rote,” we can better help them learn to create healthy lifestyles they can sustain by teaching a strategy that is the exact opposite of habit formation: learning how to consciously, flexibly and tactically navigate the common, unexpected conflicts that healthy eating and exercise plans inevitable face. This strategy—to unhabit—will bring success for more people over the long term because it works with the ebbs and flows of life.
The post <strong>The Truth Behind Long Term Behavior Change</strong> appeared first on IDEA Health & Fitness Association.