habit change - Effective Psychotherapy

Most of us are looking for an effective and easy way to change our bad habits and improve our lifestyle. We would like to eat a more healthy diet, exercise more and save more money. There are many other behaviors and habits that we know are damaging to our health or psyche such as smoking or doom scrolling, but behavior change is difficult.

There are a few effective methods that have been documented to help. Many of the methods described below are taken from the book “The willpower instinct” by Dr. Kelly McGonigal.

Set yourself a clearly defined target. You can’t change everything at once. Set realistic, short term goals. Allow yourself baby steps, and accept that there will be relapses.
Understand what is motivating you to make the change. Be honest with yourself. If you better understand the motivation, you have a better chance of changing your behavior. The motivation has to be internal, external motivation tends to fizzle.
There is an evidence based theory that sees willpower as a muscle that needs to be trained. Make it a point to change something small and insignificant in your life. Make a change that does not require a great act of will, just a change. For example, always open doors with your left hand. You will be surprised how the ability to change one small habit influences the way you can change more important habits.
Imagine the situation that you find tempting, and imagine how you are going to cope with those situations. Imagine yourself failing to cope with temptation, how would that make you feel? It is counterintuitive, but actually imagining your failures will help you prepare better for them.
When you have an uncomfortable emotion that drives a bad habit, don’t try to avoid the emotion. Learn how to “surf” uncomfortable emotions, rather than trying to distract yourself. Pay attention to your emotions, stay with them. Feel like you are surfing the wave of emotions, and let is subside.
Document your progress. Document on paper, on your cellular device or elsewhere. Examples are documenting what you have eaten, how much you exercised, or how much you spent and on what. Pay attention to what time of day, or situations, are more challenging for you. There are numerous sites and apps that let you enter this type of information , and get support and advice from other users.
Many bad habits are driven by high levels of stress. When you feel stressed, instead of reaching for that quart of ice cream, learn positive stress reduction techniques. Examples of stress reduction techniques are deep breathing, meditation and yoga. Experiment and see what works for you.
Try and spend at least 5 minutes a day walking outside, preferably in a green space.
Make sure you get enough sleep. Try to eat nutritious food. If you are sleep deprived, or your blood sugar runs low, you are the worst version of yourself.
When possible, avoid situations that trigger the behavior you want to change.
Group support is helpful for those that feel comfortable with that.

Excess weight and obesity are problems that plague many of us in today’s world with easy access to plentiful food. Excess weight has severe health implications leading to a high incidence of diabetes, heart conditions and even cancer. Obesity also has an impact on a persons self esteem and can lead to emotional problems.

We are all aware of the challenges of losing weight. A huge industry has sprung up around weight reduction and countless books offer miracle diets that promise quick fixes. The real challenge of maintaining a healthy weight is not only to lose excess pounds but to keep the weight off over time.

Brian Warnsink offers a somewhat different approach to the issue of maintaining a healthy weight. In his approach, called slim by design, and book by the same name, Dr. Warnsink suggests simple steps to adjust our surroundings and tweak our behavior so that we will eat less, without consciously having to exert will power to achieve that goal.

Dr Warnsink points out that trying to constantly exert will power to overcome temptations , while seemingly laudable, is exhausting and when we are emotionally depleted by other demands we easily lose the self control required to monitor our food intake. His ideas have been experimentally validated and have been implemented in school cafeterias, restaurants, homes, and even at Google. The book is funny, easy to read, easy to implement. It is a leisurely afternoon read.

The premise is that we are unconsciously manipulated by our physical environment and so we should use it to our advantage.

There are some obvious changes to our environment such as making healthy food, such as fruit and vegetables, easily accessible and in sight while keeping less healthy snacking food such as cereals in a harder to reach cupboard.

There are other less obvious changes to our eating habits that make a measurable change to the amount we eat. Dr Warnsink has found that the size of the plate we eat from has a large influence on the amount we eat. He suggest eating from a smaller plate.

Dr Wansink offers strategies for reducing food consumption at home, in restaurants and for negotiating shopping in a supermarket so as to eat a more healthy diet. While some of this may seem obvious, the value of the approach is to find ways in which we do not have to consciously work at reducing calories.

Tag: habit change

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Michelle Samuel, LCSW

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