Tag Archives: 2016

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January 23, 2016

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2016: Feeling ‘Better Than Before’

What I’ve learned about resolutions and habits

I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is: I’ve neglected my website. The good news is: I haven’t neglected to work on my habits and theme for 2016. I purposely waited until this very day to share my theme for this year. Why? Today is the one-year anniversary of when I adopted and successfully started working towards my Theme of 2015: Control.

As I wrote in my previous post, making New Year’s Resolutions are tough. Sometimes, resolutions aren’t resolute enough and that’s why 90 percent of our resolutions fail. If you make the resolution to “eat healthily” you aren’t really going off of anything. Your resolutions, or goals, need to be more personalized and instinctual. Instead, your resolution can be to “eat more fruits and vegetables during lunch.” This can be an easier habit to track and offers more of a structured goal for you to follow.

My previous post put a big kibosh on resolutions. I don’t like them. I don’t like that kind of pressure —no one does! You don’t need to wait until January 1 to start improving your life. As I was saying, resolutions aren’t the answer: if you really want to see change, you need to form habits. Habits are automated responses that you learn through repetition. Your prefrontal cortex, a region of your brain, performs these reactions. For example, ever wonder why you can drive and think about a hundred things at once? Your prefrontal cortex puts your brain into “automated mode,” and you are able to think about what errands you need to run after work or let your mind wander while driving.

Forming habits takes a lot of hard work — and practice. The fact that it takes 21 days to form a habit is a common myth. True experts say that it takes up to 18 to 254 days to form a habit. Doing so all depends on your willpower, self-control, and patience! It’s different for every person. In my case, it took less than a year to form a habit. After seeing someone for almost a year, I am able to control my thinking and curb my anxiety without much effort. Seeing my psychologist has become a routine, and utilizing the tools I have learned have become a routine also.

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My theme for 2016: health

After some reflection, I have chosen my theme for 2016: Health. I have two overarching goals this year that encompass the overall theme of Health:

  • See my psychologist once every two weeks and continue to maintain control over my anxiety and depression
  • Go to the gym three times a week or 12 times a month and take a spinning class on Fridays to improve my physical fitness levels (and look good in my wedding dress)

I have chosen this theme for a few reasons. The first and the most obvious reason is that I will be planning a wedding for the next eight months. Planning a wedding, although thrilling and indescribable, is very stressful. It is key that I continue to see my psychologist so I am able to learn more tools and continue to work towards managing my anxiety during this fun yet intensified time.

My other reason is a little more deep-rooted. Throughout my life, I have struggled with self-esteem and body image issues —which makes sense, as both of those correlate with anxiety and depression. I have always “hated” how I looked and would take time to look at myself and point out flaws that I noticed from my chicken pox scars to my stomach. I am never fully satisfied. My goal this year is to work on that and learn to love my body and how I look. I made the goal to go to the gym three times a week, or 12 times a month, in order to work on my physical strength and improve my body.

With the combination of improving my mental health and loving myself on the inside as well as the outside, I hope to achieve my overarching goals and my overall theme of Health in 2016.

In her book, Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin says: “The key to habits is decision making, or the lack of decision making” and “habits eliminate the need for self-control.” When we change our habits, we change our lives. The first step to changing our habits is getting to know our tendencies, and then afterward we can monitor our habits and how well we do at reaching our goals.

One crucial thing I keep telling myself is that I need to cut myself some slack. It is totally OK to goof off once in a while and let yourself enjoy the little things in life. That’s why I am not making a personalized “healthy eating” goal. The truth is, I eat pretty healthy, but sometimes, I let myself cheat a little bit. I enjoy pasta and I enjoy carbs. I love food, and I love experimenting with food. I think that’s perfectly OK. I have amazing self-control when it comes to healthy eating.

Ian, however, doesn’t, and that makes it a challenge at home. It’s a good challenge! When Ian makes brownies or cookies, I will have one or two, and he will eat the rest. I decided that I don’t really need to fine-tune my healthy eating habits, but my exercising and mental habits still need some work.

I am excited to keep working towards my goals and work towards meeting my theme for 2016. Rubin’s Better than Before is insightful and I am learning new things about habits and the way our minds work on every page. I look forward to sharing some of those facts with you and encourage that you pick up a copy. It’s always good to work towards a goal or forming a new habit and find that you feel better than before.

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December 31, 2015

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2016: Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions, Form Habits

Why habits are more effective than resolutions

The approach of 2016 has me thinking about resolutions. If you’re a frequent reader, then you know that I am a big fan of Gretchen Rubin, an expert on happiness and lifestyle. In all three of her books and on her blog, she talks about how she keeps resolutions. One of her most recent tips is to choose a “one-word theme” to help clarify an overarching goal. In her blog post, Gretchen explains:

“I love resolutions, and as I wrote about in my book Happier at Home, for the last several years, I’ve identified one idea, summarized in just one word, as an overarching theme for the entire year.”

I took Gretchen’s advice in 2015 and decided to make “Control” my theme for the year. It was time to take control of my anxiety and depression and work hard in fighting both. Since last January, I have been seeing someone who has helped me develop tools to curb my anxiety and fine-tune my ways of thinking. Now, when those depressing thoughts occur, I can control them. I am happy to say that I have grown tremendously and I am a much stronger and happier person than I was this time last year.

After some research, and looking into Rubin’s new book, Better Than Before, I realized that I met my theme or resolution, simply due to the fact that it wasn’t a resolution, to begin with. Instead, I developed a habit.

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Habits vs. Resolutions

When I first discovered this, I asked: Aren’t habits and resolutions the same thing?

No, they’re not. Habits succeed where resolutions cannot. Studies show that in order to stick with your New Year’s Resolutions you need willpower. Truth be told, some resolutions aren’t “resolute” enough. They’re too abstract and lack a concrete declaration and goal to work towards. Because of their ambiguity, your brain can’t tackle them.

According to research, in order to achieve your goals, you need to make your resolutions or goals “instinctual.” This aspect is what is missing from 90 percent of all New Year’s Resolutions,  and ultimately, why they most likely fail. For example, the resolution to “eat healthily” isn’t very personalized. You need to take that extrinsic goal and internalize it. So, instead of just saying you want to “eat healthier,” you can make the goal to start substituting fruit instead of chips at lunch. Or, if you want to focus on exercise, you can make the goal to go to the gym two-to-three times a week. You need to break down that broad resolution and see what habit, or habits, you can form to achieve your goals.

In 2015, my goal was to “go to therapy once every two weeks and learn how to take control of my life” with the overarching theme of Control. Having that concrete goal made it easy to tackle, and soon enough, it became a routine. I was accustomed to seeing someone once every two weeks, and I also formed a habit of curbing my anxious thoughts and using tools to combat my depression. I found that I would depend on those appointments, and sometimes, I would perform those tools and exercises I learned without even noticing I did them.

That’s the extraordinary thing I learned about forming habits: sometimes you don’t realize when you’ve formed them.  Habits are automated responses that are learned through repetition. These “moment by moment” actions are performed by a region in your brain called the “prefrontal cortex.” As soon as the behavior becomes automatic, the prefrontal cortex goes into sleep mode.

Forming habits and breaking habits take a lot of work. The idea can be daunting, but it is not impossible.

“Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life,” Rubin writes in her book, Better Than Before. “We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.”

So this year take the challenge. Instead of making a New Year’s Resolution, try to form a habit instead. After we ring in the New Year, I will share my theme for 2016, and what habits I hope to make, and break, this year.