Small changes for a big 2021
Many people’s New Year resolutions centre on diet, exercise, sleep and stress. But sustaining your efforts beyond February is the real challenge, writes Niki Bezzant.
This year was quite the year. For many of us, the summer break acts as awelcome circuit breaker, a chance to reflect and a chance to regroup for 2021.
It’s also a chance to work on improving our health. Many people’s resolutions centre around ‘‘the big four’’ of wellbeing: diet, exercise, sleep and stress. What often happens, though, is thatwe start with a burst of energy and motivation in January, only to lose impetus and peter out by the time February rolls around.
It’s a typical scenario, according to health psychologist Fiona Crichton.
‘‘There’s research to show just 4 per cent of people manage to meet their New Year’s resolutions. It’s tiny,’’ she says.
Whatwe’re doingwrong is making our goals too epic, Crichton says. ‘‘We set lofty goals, we don’t set smart goals. We don’t set small, meaningful goals and then look at the progress we’remaking along the way.’’
Crichton is an expert in behaviour change. But even she sayswe need to understand change is hard.
‘‘There’s a reason we do things the way we do. It’s because we like doing it that way. It’s hard to change, even when we know we should.
‘‘The example I use is evenwhen you know you might die, taking a medication in a certain way – the risk is that you might die – people still don’t. We don’t deal well with even the threat of death to make us do something that we don’t want to do.’’
So cut yourself some slack. And read on for some tips from the experts on small, simple and sustainable ways to change your thinking and, in the process, improve your diet, exercise, sleep and stress this year.
Eating better
Nutritionist Claire Turnbull has spent her career helping people develop better eating habits.
She says healthy eating has very little to do with what we put into our mouths and a lot to do with what’s going on between our ears.
‘‘The difference between people who try really hard to be healthy and thosewho are naturally healthy is that people who are naturally healthy don’t think about it. Their behaviours around food are subconscious.’’
It relates, she says, to two different parts of the brain.
‘‘The limbic part of your brain is the habitual centrewhere those subconscious behaviours are stored. Otherwise, you’re relying on the frontal part of your brain, which gets tired.
‘‘And if you are trying to eat well – if you’re trying to make a decision about food that sits in a part of your brainwhere you have to remember to do that – as soon as we get busy or tired, our willpower declines and our ability to eat well and make good decisions – conscious decisions – about food, gets very poor.’’
To make our food behaviours unconscious – to become one of those naturally healthy people – Turnbull recommends ‘‘habit stacking’’.
‘‘Habit stacking is linking a new habit to an existing habit. That is probably one of the easiest ways to do something new and positive.
‘‘So, for example, if your goal is to drink more water, what is something that you do every single day that you could link to the habit of drinking water?
‘‘Maybe the easiest thing is to do it everymorning. When you get up, after you brush your teeth, have a glass of water.’’
Sometimes, says Turnbull, to create a new habitwemight need to break an old one.
‘‘One thing I get people to do is to write down what they’ve eaten in a day. I’m not even remotely interested in what they’ve eaten. I’m looking at why did you eat that? Circle the things you ate when you weren’t hungry. And then look back at that and say, what was I, then? Was I bored? Was it just because it was there?
‘‘If you can increase that [decisionmaking] second to 5 seconds, you have the capacity to make something unconscious, conscious.’’
So what’s her No 1, bang-for-buck nutrition behaviour we could prioritise to help us eat better?
‘‘Absolutely, it is planning. Without a plan, when you walk through the door and you’re hungry, you are oftenmaking poor subconscious decisions about food. When you have a plan, you have a precommitment to what you are eating.’’
We need to plan for a bit of chaos, too.
‘‘Plan backup options for crazy nights. Plan for busy-ness. Otherwise, people have an unrealistic expectation, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, I can’t do it. I’ll just get a takeaway.’’’
Turnbull says, in her house, she plans for omelette night every single week.
‘‘It’s a nightwhere I plan not to cook, but I know that we’re going to have an omelette, or fresh pasta and frozen vegetables. So there’s always a fresh pasta and a large thing of frozen vegetables in the freezer.’’
Getting fit
It’s the dream: a toned body glowing with health. Or maybe, we just want to be able to walk up that hill without getting puffed. Whatever the case, fitness can be a hard goal to start on.
That’s because it calls for us to add something to our lives, according to Elaine Hargreaves, an Associate Professor at Otago University, and an expert in exercise and motivation.
‘‘When you talk about diet, generally it’s changing something you’re already doing but for physical activity you have to add something to your life and it has to replace something else.
‘‘I think people start off with a hiss and a roar and then they find it’s difficult and other things take priority. And so physical activity always drops off unless you can find that reason why you want to prioritise it.’’
Hargreaves says weight loss is not a great reason.
‘‘It’s not a good outcome to focus on andwe know that weight loss doesn’t
happen just with a change in physical activity. And so it gets to that point where people go, ‘I’m doing all this physical activity, but my weight’s not changing.’’’
‘‘If we can get people to focus on more of those immediate responses that they have from physical activity, like sleeping better or having more energy or – my favourite – ‘this just makesme feel good’, those should be the little motivators that keep us going from exercise session to exercise session. So that in three months’ time, ‘Oh, I’m fitter, but it’s not what I’ve actually been trying to achieve; I’m doing it because this actuallymakes me feel good. And I have this sense of wellbeing from each session I do.’’’
We can start small, she says, and we don’t have to do all of our exercise in one go. Recently released new guidelines from theWHOsay we need 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week.
‘‘It doesn’t matter how you accumulate that 150 minutes. So you could do five minutes here and there across the day, and technically that should get you those health benefits.’’
Hargreaves reckons getting support is another winning strategy when it comes to keeping exercise going.
‘‘Lots of people who are active have a supportive spouse who will look after the kids so the partner can go and be active. Having that support and encouragement within the family is really important.’’
Sleeping better
Sorting out poor sleep might also start with a shift in thinking.
Sleep specialist Dr Tony Fernando reckons some of us need to rethink our relationship with sleep.
‘‘Being realistic about what sleep is can be very helpful. Sleep is often not perfect. And that’s OK.’’
Fernando says we can have unrealistic expectations of sleep.
‘‘I see it with a lot of my patients. The expectation that sleep should be solid. That you should get eight hours of sleep, and when you go to bed, you close your eyes and boom, you sleep. But that’s not normal for everyone.
‘‘So I’m waking up in the middle of the night? It’s OK. Sometimes once or twice, especially if it’s short, to go to the toilet. It’s OK.
‘‘What’s not OK is when you worry about it, like, ‘Oh my gosh, why am I awake? There’s somethingwrong with me.’ So now you’ve started this habit of worrying about sleep. And then it can perpetuate itself into being phobic about sleep.’’
Instead, telling ourselves sleep is often disrupted, it’s the natural sleep cycle we all have, can be reassuring enough to send us back to sleep.
There are some practical things we can do, too. Lay off the devices a minimum of an hour before bed; that’s so the blue light doesn’t interfere with our melatonin secretion and the constant scrolling doesn’t stimulate our brains.
He recommends another more useful way to use them: listening to podcasts.
‘‘That’s much better than reading or scrolling and much safer than having your face blasted with a very bright blue light.’’
The other thing we can focus on is alcohol.
Alcohol makes us sleepy, he says, ‘‘that’swhy it’s the most commonly used sleep chemical out there.
‘‘The problem is the breakdown products of alcohol ruin sleep. So once you’ve metabolised it, themetabolic products of alcohol can actually be detrimental to sleep.
‘‘I’m not saying people should stop, but be smart with alcohol. So limiting the amount or having alcoholmuch earlier than usual so that your body hopefully can degrade it before you go to sleep.’’
Beating stress
Stress is simultaneously amodern curse and a badge of honour.
Yet we know it has bad effects on our health, linked to everything from depression and anxiety, to weight gain and cancers. Health psychologist Fiona Crichton sayswe need to change the stress conversation from managing stress to enhancing life.
‘‘We have lived with this deficit model of mental wellbeing to the point where we pathologise normal experiences.
‘‘So we tend to think of ourselves as being depressed, or sad or lonely, rather than saying, ‘You know, this is about being a human being. What resources do I need to deal with being a human?’
‘‘And if we flip it over from thinking ‘what do I do when I’m stressed’, to ‘what do I do to live so thatwhen the stress comes, I can manage it’, we will be a lot better off.
‘‘All of us as parents, as partners, as children, should be looking at the things that top us up, so that we can be there for others, that we can be there for ourselves.
‘‘And if we prioritise that, thenwe will be productive in our lives, deal with stress better, and just generally be better.’’
So what does that look like? ‘‘Every day, do something that’s fun or that reminds you of joy. Be curious.
‘‘When I’m out gardening, I’ll take amoment to look around and notice what’s around me. ‘What can I hear? What can I see? What am I touching?’ Bring yourself back into your body.
‘‘What we know is that calms down the limbic system of the brain sowe know that we’re OK. And when we do that, we’ll experience a sense of calm.
‘‘You could even programme it into your phone, I’m taking a couple of minutes just to breathe and notice the stuff that’s around me. It sounds naff, but it really works.
‘‘These are tiny things. When you’re at the lights, turn up the music. It’s not about taking time out of your day. It’s actually just using the time that you have.
‘‘It’s using those little times to put in the fun that you used to have when you were 5 or 6 or 7. Ifwe lived our lives like that, we would feel a lot better.’’
She also recommends the ‘‘three good things’’ exercise.
‘‘It takes no time at all. When you go to bed, you say, ‘What are three good things that happened tome today?’ I enjoyed my coffee. I had a lovely walk with the dog and the woman at work smiled atme when I was feeling a bit low.
‘‘Again, all of these tiny, simple things that sound so naff actually reframe the waywe live our lives, and also rewire the brain for optimism and hope. It makes us feel better.’’