Habits – Routines, Habits & Lifestyle
Happy New Year
HAPPY 2023!! We hope you all have had a wonderful holiday season with your loved ones! As we know, walking into a new year often comes with resolutions and changes for overall life and well-being improvements. While the idea of committing to improvement in the new year sounds appealing, 70-80% of people who make a new resolution in the new year fail to follow through within the first 90 days.
So, in this series, we want to provide some helpful tips and tricks for how to be able to maintain the changes we want to see in our day to day lives. We hope to be able to support you, see you succeed, and help you to achieve your goals!
Routines, Habits, & Lifestyle
To get started we want to talk about the important distinctions between common terms we use to refer to our consistent behaviors. These include Routine, Habit, & Lifestyle. By definition, a routine is a behavior that is frequently done, often in sequence. For example, a morning routine often includes brushing your teeth. A habit on the other hand is something that is hard to break. By definition a habit is a mode of behavior that becomes nearly or completely involuntary. For example, every night before I go to bed, I say a prayer of gratitude for the previous day, and pray for the day to come. This is a habit that is so ingrained in my behavior that it would be a significant shift to do things differently.
Then, looking a step further, a lifestyle is a behavior that becomes a part of our identity. This is typically a way of life, whether that be for an individual, a group or a culture as a whole. So, our lifestyle would then be how we define ourselves to others. Whether that be as a husband or as a wife, as a mother, father, sister or brother, home owner, as an entrepreneur, etc., our lifestyle is a definition of who we are. So, then this begs the question of how these terms define a different level of behavioral tendencies. It’s a matter of time and repetition. In a way, very similar to the procedure in which chiropractic affects the body. It is only through time and repetition that the body is able to truly heal. Similarly, it also takes time and repetition for a behavior to become integrated into our lifestyle and into our overall identity.
Routines, Habits, & Lifestyle
Therefore, a behavior that becomes a part of our lifestyle is much more significant than simply meeting a goal. A goal could simply be a number on a scale or a specific value in a bank account. Rather, specific behaviors in order to meet our goals can become a part of our routine. This can then become a habit that is an established part of our day to day life. Our hope is that this then eventually becomes a lifestyle that is inseparable from your sense of self. For example, if your goal in this new year is to be more active, establishing exercise as a part of your routine, to the point that this eventually becomes a habit and then by definition a part of your lifestyle, this is not only where we are able to meet our goals, but further where lasting, sustainable change is able to occur.
Here in this new year, we hope you’re excited about your goals, and we hope to be able to support you in incorporating them into your routine. We are further excited to help you grow this routine into habits and these habits into a lifestyle that becomes a part of who you are. Our goal in this new year is to help you not only meet your resolutions, but to establish a lifestyle – an identity of health, wellness and satisfaction.
