By Ashley Champagne-Post, Licensed Clinical Social Worker at PureView
When you are spending the holiday season in merriment with celebrations, it’s good to take the time to remember healthy habits. Even your basic self-care routine often gets forgotten during the busiest time of year while managing the holiday-scheduled festivities. However, if you focus on healthy habits during the holiday season, those New Year's resolutions may bring much more joy!
If you haven’t read the book “Atomic Habits,” I would advise you to pick up a copy of this book at your local bookstore or check your local library! It is a terrific book and an easy read! The author identifies the idea that small changes now can lead to an astonishing rate of change done daily over an entire year and uses the example of how bamboo grows to gain a better picture.
Bamboo develops a complex root system underground first and then shoots up seemingly overnight. Focusing on the small habits for a larger goal allows the celebration of accomplishments to happen quickly and consistently, which is more rewarding! Habits are accomplished by a repetitive process of cues, craving, response, and reward. As an example, the cue of seeing a Christmas tree leads to craving presents and then responding with spending money on gifts and gaining the reward of seeing the joy in our loved ones come Christmas morning! We are wired to this pattern, which is how we move through our days.
So, how do I start with creating healthy habits? Atomic Habits tells us first to do a Habit Scorecard and take stock of our current habits. After you identify your everyday routine, insert the desired habit you want to implement with another already embedded habit (habit stacking.) For example, starting a new medication can be more successful when we habit stack with an already established habit of brushing our teeth in the morning.
The book also explores the success of combining something you like doing with something you need to do through temptation bundling. Temptation bundling is purposefully connecting the psychology of reward systems and creating more of a reward connection in what we need to do (but don’t want to) with a pairing to something we enjoy. A simple example of temptation bundling is reading your favorite book while walking on the treadmill.
If you made a small change today around the holiday season and having healthy habits, what would it be?
(Atomic Habits; An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, 2018)