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[Advice] In order to change habits, you need to be extremely realistic about where you currently are and make small goals across time to get to your end goal.
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ohhoneyno_ is in Advice
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Hi, friends.

I am here to give you the best advice I personally have used and see necessary in others journeys that will actually help and I'd like to break things down.

Creating better habits in life is a process that takes a long time of continuous adherence to the new habit. It's said that it takes anywhere from 18-266 days of continuously doing the same habit to create said habit. The average person takes 66 days. That's 2 months of doing the habit every day, my friends!!

The mistake that I see most people make when wanting to change a bad habit or create a new habit is that they:

  1. Aspire to change something far too drastically to realistically continue for that long.

  2. Not being honest about where they are starting from.

The best example of this are crash diets or extreme eating habit changes in one day. People who regularly eat junk food, prefer junk food, have cabinets and fridges full of junk food decide that on Monday they're gonna go fully keto or someone who primarily eats meat and hates vegetables decides on Monday that they're going to go vegan. These aren't realistic goals for a few reasons.

  1. Financial burden. If you decide you're going to start adhering to a strict diet of things you don't already have in your household, not only are you going to be wasting so much of the food you currently have but you'll also need to take on the burden of grocery shopping for an entirely new eating habit! That's a ton of upfront cost and waste that most of us cannot afford.

  2. Finding recipes that adhere to these diets that you actually like and will eat takes time and experimentation! If you hate everything you have to eat because you don't know how to prepare it in a way you like, then you're way more likely to abandon it fairly quickly bc let's be realistic, sometimes eating is the only thing we get to look forward to in a day.

  3. Too much change too quickly = recipe for disaster. Look at evolution. Evolution literally takes centuries to change meaning that we were not built to change everything we have ever known or done in one day! Small, beneficial changes in your current lifestyle are more likely to stick than huge changes! ANY change towards bettering something is a success, even if it is small.

  4. Falling into the "all or nothing" fallacy. You remember when you were young and you'd be asked what you wanted to be when you grew up and everyone was like "race car driver, astronaut, doctor"? Look at how many of us reached those big dreams. Are we failures because we didn't grow up to be an astronaut and now work in a field that gives us a lifestyle that we are okay with and have a life that, for the most part, we are Content with? No! Because not everyone can be a doctor. Not everyone can be an astronaut. We need janitors and bartenders and chefs and police officers and mailmen and garbage collectors. We need all those supportive jobs to live! So, to bring that back to the fallacy, it links to too muxh change too quickly. Just because you can't fully transition to being a vegan in one night doesn't mean that you can't work your way towards it. Life isn't all or nothing. There's so many shades of gray and spectrums!

So, to wrap this all up, I want to say that being realistic about where you currently are and where you want to be is so important and that when deciding to change for the better, making those small, realistic goals is how you are going to actually achieve them. I'll give you my example.

I used to be the type of person who would sleep all day long, go to work, party, come home, wake up an hour and a half before my shift to get ready and drive there just to rinse and repeat. On days I didn't work, I'd sleep for 10-13 hours, easily. I felt awful most days and when I had to work again, it would take me 2-3 days to not wake up completely exhausted. If you told me 2 years ago that I'd be naturally waking up between 6-7 am and being productive that early, I'd have laughed you out the door because I have never been like that. I was a self proclaimed night person! But, here I am 2 years later and I can tell you that I can't even stay awake past 1 am anymore. I'm totally useless past 10-11 pm. It's been a huge change and I have my own system, but I just wanted to tell you that these huge changes in lifestyle are possible, but they take time, commitment, realistic goals, and being able to see and celebrate your small victories.

I hope this helps.

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3 years ago