Creating Healthy Habits
As we spring into April, and we focus on new life and renewal, a saying by Louis Pasteur pops into my head, “luck favors the prepared mind.” What Pasteur was implying by this quote is that being prepared increases your likelihood of success in the things you do. Whether it be gardening, detoxing, weight loss or whatever goal you have set for yourself, the Pasteur (and the boy scouts) were right in that we should “be prepared”.
I find a great way to set myself up for success is to make a schedule. This helps me prepare for the day. Phillip Weeks from the Weston Price Foundation said once, ”routine is the foundation of wellness.” It is essential to create healthy habits in order to reach our wellness goals.
At the Logan Institute, we often ask people to make significant lifestyle changes, like eliminating gluten and dairy, exercising, or taking a supplement essential to the healing process. Many people struggle with adopting these recommendations because they find it difficult to incorporate the changes into their daily routines. Some start strong and fizzle out. Others are slow adopters but commit once they begin to notice changes. And some find they are not able to fully commit at any point in the journey... No matter which category you fall into (it probably varies depending on the challenge set before you), research conducted by Phillippa Lally, a health psychology researcher at University College London, showed that “on average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact.”
What this means for those of us who are trying to make lifestyle changes to improve our health is that we must incorporate our new habit into our daily routine or it may never become second nature. I challenge us, myself included, to set a goal for ourselves this spring and add it into our daily or weekly routine. Michael Hyatt, the founder of Full Focus, a company that assists people in setting, planning and achieving their goals, summed it up when he said, “what gets scheduled, gets done.”
So let’s add into our schedules the smoothie or the morning walk or the time of meditation or prayer. Let’s make it non-negotiable and let’s actually make time for it. Let’s write it down and commit. Let’s start our wellness journey with a dedication to forming new healthy habits, one day at a time.
-Dr. Litty
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