Okay friends, for today’s Thoughtful Thursday post I wanted to talk about the importance of sustainability in your lifestyle. It can be challenging to change your lifestyle. However, there are times in life where you may evaluate the way you have been living and want to make a change. I would argue that one of the most important things to consider when changing your lifestyle is if it is a sustainable way for you to live. Success or longevity happens far more often in consistency rather than in perfection. Whether you want to exercise and eat healthier, start a journey towards decluttering and minimalism, start a new cleaning routine, or find better work/life balance, the important thing is to make changes you can stick to!

So often when making a change in lifestyle, people try to change too much all at once and expect perfection. It can be really defeating when you don’t meet the expectations you set for yourself and often lead to giving up. But if you come up with a plan that is sustainable, then you are more likely to have follow-through!

If you are ready to start a new exercise or diet routine, it’s best to start with small changes so you can have some wins! This helps you to feel more capable and therefore you are more likely to have follow-through. This is an extreme example: but if you have never exercised before, I would suggest not deciding one day that you are going to exercise 6 times a week for an hour each day! It would be challenging to make that drastic of a lifestyle change overnight. It is more sustainable to choose to workout one or two days a week. Maybe just walking around the block at first – working up to more frequent and harder workouts. So often when we want to make a lifestyle change, we are impatient with the results and that is why we go hard and fast. If you want lasting change, there really are no shortcuts. You must work through the process and be patient. Anyone you see who is fit did not get like that overnight. Likely it was hard work and consistency that got them where they are.

Changing your diet in a sustainable way can be really challenging. I have been wanting to incorporate more protein into my diet, however I am not a big meat eater, so for me it would not be sustainable to just add more meat to my diet. I have had to get creative to find ways to add extra protein into the existing way I eat. The other day I made protein pancakes to add extra protein to something that I wanted to eat!

Maybe you are ready to start a decluttering journey, or a journey towards minimalism. Once again the key to success when pursuing something is that it is sustainable for you. Often people don’t have the time or physical and emotional bandwidth to declutter a lot of items in a short period of time. Instead of pressuring yourself to declutter everything at once perhaps focus on one area at a time, maybe choosing to do one space per week. When you declutter small amounts over a longer period of time, it will feel more achievable and then you will be more likely to have follow-through. There is that phrase “follow-through” again. When things are sustainable, we are more likely to have success. 

If you are trying to become more minimal, it is best to evaluate your lifestyle, age, if you have children, and hobbies in order to create a space that is minimal but also sustainable. If you are hasty and get rid of everything at once you may get rid of things that you actually wanted or needed. I really love fashion, but over the years as I have pursued minimalism I have thought about downsizing my wardrobe. I finally decided that a small, capsule, or basic wardrobe really wasn’t sustainable for me. I like to have a variety of items to choose from in my wardrobe and that’s okay!

Another area of life that you may want to change is your cleaning schedule/routine. Once again, in order to be successful you have to come up with a schedule that is reasonable for your lifestyle. Maybe you work during the week and don’t have time to clean during the week and you have to get all of your cleaning done on the weekend. Or perhaps you are the opposite and your weekends are full with kids’ activities or other obligations outside of the home, but you can do a little bit of cleaning each day of the week. It’s best to figure out what works with your schedule, which will make implementing a cleaning routine more sustainable.

Lastly, perhaps you are trying to find a better work-life balance. We must find ways to make that sustainable. Perhaps there are things in your job that you can delegate to others, freeing up more of your time. Or there could be things on your plate that aren’t necessary and you could eliminate them all together. If you don’t evaluate what changes can be made and you just try to fit more and more into your calendar, that will over time burn you out and will not be sustainable. You must be realistic about the amount of time you have each day, and your personal bandwidth of what you can do. 

Changing your lifestyle isn’t always easy, but it is doable. You are more likely to have success if you are able to think through ways the new lifestyle can be sustainable for you.