Tag Archives: goals

The Key to Behavior Change-Create Tiny Habits

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Create tiny habits every day to reach your desired goal.

It’s a given that we cling to what we’re familiar with, and change is very hard. If only you could change your behavior, reach your big goal and lose that last 10 pounds.

There are multiple tales of accidents in the Himalayas when the warmth of the snow was so inviting to the victim that they simply wanted to stay resting where they were, comfortable in the snow. Getting up, and walking around shaking out their limbs to warm up would save their life, yet they don’t, and die there in the snow. We cling to what’s comfortable. Though I’m not suggesting camping out in your backyard to test your winter survival skills, you needn’t feel like you can’t change. For instance, if weight loss is your goal, you don’t have to just wish you had more willpower.

You aren’t alone in feeling like another trendy diet might be too hard to stick with, as research shows that fewer than 5 percent of dieters can keep weight off. Keep it simple. For long-term health behavior change, learning a skill, a new tactic, can help you succeed in your goals. Acquiring a new skill is a breakthrough as it becomes an action that creates change. And that action can be as simple as saying, “No dessert tonight,” rather than saying, “Stop eating sugar.” When you take that newly acquired skill and change it into a habit, you can gain an increased ability to change. What if you took tiny steps, and were able to build those steps into your life to meet your biggest challenges?

Shrink the problem

Don’t blame your willpower or motivation if you want to create new behaviors in your life. In many cases, you need a skill to fix things. B.J. Fogg, a behavior scientist at Stanford University, brilliantly describes this as a “skill scan.” The above-mentioned “stop eating sugar” is a principle, and ultimately not very helpful over time. Saying “No dessert tonight” is an action. Take four minutes to do the skill scan.

Step 1—Set a timer, and write down every skill you can think of that you might need to accomplish what you want. Let’s say the problem is fat loss, and you’ve listed eat less, move more, eat clean, stop eating sugar and go gluten-free.

Step 2—Take a colored pencil and cross off anything that you wrote that is not an action that can go on a calendar. On my fat-loss list, all of my skills are principles. These principles are a tall order to fit in the real world, especially during the holidays. If you wrote, for example, “Don’t have bread with dinner,” you now have a viable, simple action. No bread with dinner. Fogg’s approach eliminates guilt and feeling bad about why you don’t have enough willpower. Instead, this approach shrinks the problem, by giving you a new skill, which over time, becomes a desired habit.

Step 3—Write down your new habit that you want to build into your life. Fogg’s favorite example is to ask his students to floss just one tooth, a perfect example of building tiny habits into your daily life.

 Step 4—Celebrate your success in a healthy way. Be proud of your accomplishments, as change is as natural as our world is.

Wishing you a wonderful Christmas filled with happiness, hope and joy!

Published in the Idaho Mountain Express, December 22, 2017

http://www.mtexpress.com/wood_river_journal/features/fitness-guru/article_8c5e8a6a-e69b-11e7-915c-6bdb90b24b3e.html

New Years Resolutions-Do they work?

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Model Katie Lee holds a kettle bell pondering her New years Resolution.

Model Katie Lee holds a kettle bell   and ponders her New Year’s resolutions. Health and Fitness Specialist Connie Aronson recommends that those who wish to keep their resolutions ” wait 10 minutes” or ” write themselves a letter.” Courtesy photo of Connie Aronson.

Every year, 45% of Americans make a New Year’s Resolution, an earnest promise to be better or try harder. Call them the agents of change, as theses people are ten times more likely to attain their goals.
Last year, according to a University of Scranton study, losing weight, getting organized, spending less and saving more were the top three resolutions. Maybe the bravery of setting new goals is just too overwhelming for the rest of us. After all, change is hard.

The good news is that you don’t need a new diet or self-help book, or just plain will power. Science shows that our bodies and brains need to get on board together. We need to understand why we aren’t already doing the particular things we need to do for change to occur.

We all struggle with temptation, addictions, distractions, excuses, and procrastination. Overeating chocolate mint brittle all week long doesn’t mean you are a bad person. Our struggles are universal experiences and part of the human condition. “Our human nature,” writes Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., in The Willpower Instinct, “includes both the self that wants instant gratification and the self with a higher purpose.”

Dr. McGonigal describes our struggles with temptation and procrastination from research published in 2007 involving some chimpanzees and humans. The humans were students from Harvard and the chimps from the prestigious Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Center in Leipzig. The challenge was to delay the gratification of an immediate snack for more food. The temptation: Grapes for the chimps, and raisins, popcorn, M&M’s and Goldfish crackers for the humans.

First, they could all choose between 2 or 6 treats, which was easy, as both humans and chimps agreed that six was better than two. Then each competitor was given the choice to eat two treats immediately, or wait two minutes for six. When they had to wait for the treat, the patient chimps won out: an impressive 72% of the time, yet the students waited only 19% of the time.

Blame it on how humans rationalize. We have all sorts of mental tricks thanks to our prefrontal cortex’s ability to rationalize bad decisions and promise we’ll be better tomorrow.

“We’re rational until we aren’t,” Dr. McGonigal writes. The same goes for when the short-term reward is staring at us in the face: we want it now. Immediate gratification.

Try either of these following tips for success in reaching your goals in 2014:

Wait ten minutes

The brain’s reward system doesn’t care about the future.

Staring at M&M’s triggers the older, more primitive reward system of dopamine driven desire, when food for survival was the reward system’s original target. But temptation has a narrow window of opportunity.

As a waitress, management taught us that dessert sales were lost if you didn’t get to the table as soon as dinner plates were removed. When temptation is visible, the warm cobbler going to the next table for example, the prefrontal cortex is really overwhelmed. If you have to wait for your waiter, or distance yourself between you and the temptation, the balance of power goes back to the brain’s system of control.

The same is true for your own trigger: put them out of sight.

Write yourself a letter

“Imagine looking back at 2014, from a place of having achieved your most important goal for the year,” Dr. McGonigal writes in “Five Things You Can Do Instead of New Year’s Resolutions.” “In your letter, thank your present self for all you did to achieve your goals—and be specific. Or give yourself some compassionate advice from your wiser, 2015 self. Research shows that connecting to your future self in this way can help you make a difficult change and succeed at your goals.”

Harnessing personal strength

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The positive psychology movement believes that cultivating what is best in ourselves increases our sense of well-being. Our character strengths and their connection with life satisfaction and happiness is an important research field in positive psychology. A new large-scale study conducted by a team of psychologists from the University of Zurich proved that the largest impact was evident in training the strengths: curiosity, gratitude, optimism, humor and enthusiasm. It’s no surprise that these participants were more often in a good mood and more cheerful.

Rather than focusing on our quirks, the newer field of psychology focuses on how humans flourish. The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, home to the founder of the movement, Martin Seligman, calls it “the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.” We all have problems and stresses, but manifesting your strengths can help you increase your happiness, improve your relationships and achieve your life goals.

How happy?

Our temperament and personality traits are partially inborn. Research estimates that the genetic component of happiness is 50 percent inherited, with another 40 percent under our power to control. The final 10 percent depends on circumstances. However, sometimes we don’t even know what will make us happy—we’re too busy worrying about the future or the past. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, in his book “Stumbling on Happiness,” says that how we feel in the moment colors how you imagine you will feel in the future. We can never really know how things will affect us, and the truth is that bad things, or good, don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to.

We have many character strengths, and you might not even realize that you use them naturally and easily, particularly when you set out to do something similar to the values you believe. It is one of the reasons you accomplish goals. According to a study presented at the British Psychological Society, only about one-third of us have a useful understanding of our strengths.

I recently had a look at my signature, middle and lower strengths, available at www.viacharacter.org, a 240-question survey. The questionnaire graphs 24 character strengths and ranks the top five. The classifications derived from six major virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. For example, an appreciation of beauty, great art or being enthralled by music is a strength that helps to connect with something outside of yourself. It is likely you are empathic or strongly value being grateful, each of which contributes to healthier relationships. You might find spiritual benefits with this strength because you feel a sense of wonder or elevation. You are likely more accepting of the present moment, and this can lead to times of calm and peace.

According to the VIA Institute On Character, a nonprofit organization, “the classification reflects the world’s major religious writings, including the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita, as well as studies of major philosophies.”

As for me, I’m going to take an honest look at my lesser strengths, laugh more and get to work—happily.

Connie Aronson is an ACSM health and fitness specialist. Readers can visit her at www.conniearonson.com