The Power of Habit and Routine
Mike Lee is a Remote Coach and Partner at Method Fitness and also a coach on More Life Adventures retreats. As we are over the ‘honeymoon’ phase of January, Mike discusses how we can look to sustain good habits in the long term.
We’ve all seen that person who posts on Instagram about how they’re embracing the day. Up at 4 am for their run or training session, breakfast by 5.30 am, client calls booked by 7am, kids lunches made and school run by 8am. Remember Instagram is a highlight reel, and whilst this individual may well be an incredibly high functioning person, habits are often formed and lost out of necessity.
Do you remember the last time you postponed something that was truly quite important?
It probably didn’t feel very good. It could have been a work deadline or a commitment to the gym. This usually happens through a source of disruption in our lives. This could be anything from a death in the family, a promotion, a job loss or even a newborn child. What causes disruption to one person’s life, may be something that goes completely unnoticed in another individual’s.
That feeling after the time has passed, or the day has gone by with a missed training session doesn’t feel good. So why do we do it to ourselves?
Often the answer is simply that we’re setting our sights a little too high. Every year coaches will see this in their clients.
“I want to run a marathon this year.”
[Over time this has become one of my least favourite sentences to hear, because often the people making those commitments don’t have much understanding of how truly brutal a marathon is.]
My first question to those people is simply: “What’s the furthest distance you’ve run recently, and how often are you currently running in a week?”
If the answer is less than 10km, I often urge them to revisit their goal or to look for an understanding of why they are aiming for a marathon. Now this is not my goal to choose, so ultimately, if that’s the goal, then I will help them achieve it.
However, what is normally the case is that this person has felt like they’ve fallen out of love with their training, or perhaps even lost a rhythm in life, so they’re setting a lofty goal in order to force themselves to commit to something. But forcing a goal on yourself doesn’t always bring much joy. (See our blog post on discipline vs motivation).
So how do we get consistent? How do we find that elusive routine that enables the body clock to work with Swiss efficiency?
The answer is actually simple, but it’s not one that people often undertake: Start small.
To stay consistent, start small!
I’m going to show how this applies in a running context, but I’ll dip in and out of where else this applies as well.
Haven’t been running in many years? Don’t have appropriate running shoes? Start by getting up in the morning and walking. Spend a good amount of time on your feet. An hour’s walk for the average person is going to be around 7000-8000 steps. If that’s the first thing you’ve got done in the morning, that’s a good amount of blood flow around your body. You can even multitask whilst walking, listen to a podcast, take a work call, send some clients voice notes if that’s how you roll. If your goal is to lose weight, I can guarantee that this is going to be a big step in the right direction.
Try this for a few weeks, you’ll likely find that you actively want to go on your morning walk as it helps you feel better. Over time, there’s no harm in saying, I’ll run for 5 minutes, walk for 5 minutes at a leisurely pace. This is how a running habit is formed.
Let’s apply this to meal prepping your food.
Make life easy. If you’re not a gourmet chef, don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re going to start every day with a 10+ingredient breakfast. Peanut butter, banana, chia seeds, porridge: four ingredients, incredibly easy to make, sub the peanut butter for some chocolate spread or some protein powder if it works with your macros. This one takes roughly 5 minutes including washing up.
Once you’ve got into the habit of eating breakfast every day (insert any other meal), then you can start to look at whether you’re up to making other meals. Maybe your dinner is simply the art of whacking 8 ingredients into a crockpot or slow cooker at the same time as you’re making your porridge and leaving it to cook for 10 hours. Voila! You have dinner.
What are your priorities?
If you’re finding that you’re unable to form the habits you’ve set your sights on, your behaviour is simply indicating that your priority is not what you think it is.
There are a number of questions that you can ask yourself to determine what your priorities are. For most people, it often shocks them to find that what they think is their priority might not be so indicated by their behaviours. To start with, what will help is to gain some clarity about what you really want inside. Ask yourself these three questions.
When does time seem to fly by?
What are you doing when you feel most happy?
Where in your life are you most organised?
Link the answers to these questions and highlight what they have in common. Based on these three things, try and draw out what enabled you to work best in these situations and apply it to other areas of your life.
Tie your habits to your priorities
Is health a priority? Well, the habits that you form will be ones that actively contribute towards your health.
Is finance a priority? The habit of saving pennies each day, a few pounds each week, will go a very long way. You catch my drift.
Over to you
What habits are you finding the most challenging to stick to? Can we help?
Until 28th February you can register for More Life Adventures At Home, to help you get into better habits with your training, mobility, nutrition and recovery. We’d love you to get involved! Small actions every day can add up to quite significant changes over the course of the year.