The Healthy Habit - Simpler Is Smarter – True or False?

It’s now time to start the process of taking your habits even further.  While up to this point we’ve been focusing more on the process rather than the results, naturally you want to get great results as well.  If you’re already getting great results, well then, you’ll probably want to get even better results.

The thing about results is that they can be a great indicator of how effective your habits are.  If a person has been exercising for an hour a day, six days a week, trying to lose weight, and nothing has budged for the last six months, it’s a good indication that something needs to change.  While it’s great, this person has a habit of exercise, and it also becomes silly if they don't see the results they want with that practice after a prolonged period.  Isn’t it pretty obvious that if something isn’t working that you need to do something different?  The key, of course, wouldn’t be to change the first habit of exercise necessarily, but to tweak it a bit, such as changing the particular exercise routine up.

There’s a significant difference between starting something and improving something.  When you first start, it’s all about subtraction.  Subtraction means ignoring all kinds of things to bring your mind focused on a single action or two that you can take.  This emphasis prevents you from feeling overwhelmed – which is quite common when tackling something new.  Micro-habits are the ultimate in simplification.  A single act that takes less than a couple minutes,  Pretty freaking easy, right?

This is also why simple suggestions are given to people when they’re stuck in “paralysis by analysis.”  An individual who is overwhelmed by the process of getting thinner might be told, "Simply eat less, and move more.”  This can be a great recommendation for someone overthinking things, but it’s a worthless thing to say to someone who is already very health conscious and struggling with their weight for other reasons.  It’s too simple and not necessarily accurate in certain contexts.  Have you ever been frustrated because the advice was too simple to be helpful for where you were at and didn’t address key details?  You can see that sometimes we need to add in particular details and caveats to “complicate” things a bit.

Subtracting and simplifying gets you started.  Adding and upgrading keeps you growing.

This is a back and forth process, and we’re now ready to focus heavily on the “addition” or growth phase of your healthy habit development.  In reality, we’ve been adding something each day.  Because it was only one or two new additions, it never felt overwhelming.  This one-step-at-a-time process is how you grow.  We’re after this Ying Yang balance of keeping it simple enough that you can act on it, but adding in something new so you keep progressing.

To add without overwhelming, there are my “3 Magic Words” coming up later in this book that is hands down the most effortless way to do this that I’ve found.  For now, though, we’ll need a bit of self-assessment for how to improve upon your current habit.

There are three ways to improve practices:

Increase quantity. Examples: Go from meditating 30 seconds a day to 2 minutes a day.  Go from asking yourself what is one thing you’re grateful for each morning to asking yourself what two things you’re grateful for are.

Change quality. Examples: Go from walking to jogging.  Go from checking in with one old friend a week through email to checking in with one old friend a week with a phone call.

Add a new habit. Examples: In addition to the habit of making a healthy lunch, add in the habit of making a healthier dinner.  In addition to the practice of strength training, add in the habit of flexibility training.

Recap:

1. Simplifying things help you get started and move forward.
2. When things are kept too simple, it can stagnate progress.  Addition or change is necessary for growth.
3. New details should be added slowly, no more than a few things at a time, to prevent getting overwhelmed.

Action Step:

1. Ask yourself, “What’s my lesson from this?”
2. Come up with one way to make your healthy habit even better.  Can you increase the quantity, change the quality, or add some other component to it altogether?
3. Ask, what is a challenging but realistic target to shoot for with my habit upgrade that can be accomplished most days?  Example: “My micro-habit is reading for one minute a day, and I can realistically strive to read for ten minutes a day most days.”

Please note, the bare minimum micro-habit you’ve been doing each day is still all you need to do each day to be successful.  The upgrade is something to strive for, which you may or may not hit each day.  At no point, not even a year down the road, do you need to increase your micro-habit.  Doing more is something you allow rather than force.

Practical Personal Story: In the process of writing this book, I was working on improving some habits of my own.  One pattern I’m developing as of writing this book is to make fresh fruit and vegetable juice once each day.  My micro-habit is only to set a bowl of fresh fruit and veggies on the counter in my kitchen, typically when I’m making coffee in the morning.  This also acts as a cue, so when I go into the kitchen again later, I see the bowl and am reminded to make juice.

On a time-crunched morning, I was going to run out of the door without enough time to make juice.
I would be gone all day and wouldn’t likely want to make juice when I got back home late that night right before bed.  Knowing this, I still set the bowl on the counter while making my morning coffee even though I knew I’d probably just put it back in the refrigerator.  I do my micro-habit even if there seems to be no practical benefit because the real interest early on is creating consistency in my routine.  Remember, many micro-habits by their very nature are so small that the benefits aren’t from the direct results they produce, but rather from the momentum they build.

Because I had been juicing each day for the past week, the power of energy took effect and spurred me to want to do something beneficial still.  When I realized I wouldn’t have time to juice, I grabbed a plastic Zip-Lock bag and stuck some celery and carrots in there from my bowl to have as a snack later in the day.  While I didn’t get in my juice, I still got in some vegetables I may not have otherwise eaten.

Why is this so significant?

I didn’t lose sight of my big picture intention which is to keep my health high by eating enough fruits and vegetables.  While juicing was a specific way of accomplishing that, I didn’t get so focused on that habit as being my only means to an end.

Another hypothetical example could be if a person is developing the habit of reading a chapter of a personal development book each day and they find themselves without their book, they could still get on a blog and read some personal development or download a podcast.  Someone who usually workouts at a gym but can’t make it one day could still do some bodyweight exercises just to keep up the habit of doing some daily exercise.

The power of some of the recommendations in this book may not seem relevant to you at first.  Give it time though and you’ll start to notice how these seemingly insignificant things lead to something much greater in the long-term.