Okay friends, for today’s Thoughtful Thursday post I wanted to talk about how challenging it can be to change habits. It is challenging to incorporate new healthy habits, and it’s also challenging to change the unhealthy habits. As we end out the year I know many of you are thinking about some changes you may want to make in the new year. The new year is a great time to evaluate behavior and think about what you may want to do differently moving into the new year.

I thought this is a good time of year to address this topic and share some thoughts with you. There are a few things I have been thinking about recently with regards to habits. First, I just want to acknowledge how difficult it is to incorporate new habits into your routines. I have been doing intermittent fasting for the past 3 or 4 years, and while this may be considered a healthy habit I decided I wanted to change things up and eat protein prior to my workout in order to gain muscle. Y’all I did this for maybe two weeks, but slowly reverted back to my old habit of not eating until noon – which is after my workout. Even though my previous habit wasn’t a bad habit it was still nevertheless challenging for me to incorporate a new habit. As we think about incorporating new habits moving into the new year we must acknowledge that it will be hard. If you are wanting to change a bad habit or add a healthy habit, it will likely be extra challenging! 

I think it’s important to first be aware of the internal struggle you will experience as you make changes. It can be difficult to make lots of changes at once, and I have noticed for myself I have more success if I just focus on one or two changes at a time. If you choose one thing to focus on per month in 2024, by the end of the year you will have changed 12 habits! 

Something else that can derail new habits is failure. It can be easy to give up when we have a day where we fail to meet the expectations we have set for ourselves, but I think we will have more success if we pick ourselves up and dust off and move forward the next day. It can be hard to accept that we won’t do things perfectly, but once we do we begin to see the change sticking over the long haul.

Another thing that is important to acknowledge is that even if you have stuck with a good or healthy habit for a long period of time, it doesn’t mean that it is easy to stick to. There will be days that you don’t feel like following through. I have been someone who avidly works out since I was in middle school, but I can promise you there are some days when I am not feeling it and I want to skip the workout. It is on those days that the habit drives the behavior more than my feelings. Just because we have a habit doesn’t mean that it will always be easy to stick to it!

I do want to address that there are some habits that become an addiction and you might need to seek professional help if you are not having luck changing those habits on your own. Addiction can come in many forms these days. So many people think of substance abuse, but we can be addicted to our phones, social media, shopping, food, and more! Sometimes we need to get help from a professional to get out of these unhealthy cycles. I’m mentioning this briefly to acknowledge it, but I know that there is no simple solution to these sorts of unhealthy habits. But I did want to mention it.

I hope this post encouraged or inspired you today! I would love for you to check out my YouTube channel if you haven’t already done so! I will link the video below that I made in conjunction with this post!