Add years to your life and life to your years
Add years to your life and life to your years writes Carolyn Hansen
LOOKING FOR POSITIVE CHANGE in your life? You are not alone. Although our modern, fast-moving, “high tech” environment has created short-cuts and made life easier in many directions, living in the “fast lane” has placed excessive demands on us personally. Our time, our energy, our creativity, all being pulled in multiple directions at the same time.
This type of “external busyness” keeps us from reflecting on and being fully aware of how we live and the daily habits we entertain that together create and unfold the lives we currently live.
However, the “slow down” experienced worldwide as a result of the recent global pandemic made people all too aware of their daily habits and how they either contribute towards building a stronger,
healthier foundation, one that can stand and weather the “storms” of life or they crack, damage and subtract from the foundation they currently rely on.
It was an eye opener for many who very quickly realised their current lifestyle habits were not creating the “armour of protection” required to sustain them both mentally and physically in the long term.
This was both a wake-up call and a blessing, causing many individuals, faced with these hard, stark facts, to act towards improving the quality of their lives by consciously changing their unhealthy “life stealing” habits to healthier “life extension” ones.
Changing destructive habits to healthier ones does not happen overnight, so, taking drastic steps and making sudden, dramatic changes is not the answer. This type of “impatient” mentality aligns with the
modern societal need for immediate gratification, expecting immediate returns without putting quality “time in”.
The only one that profits from these types of extreme measures are the ones selling the goods!
Dramatic or drastic actions never lead to permanent positive lifestyle changes/ habits for anyone. At most, they provide a temporary boost, but these short-lived bursts of activity fizzle like a firework display when motivation and enthusiasm wane.
Trying to build life-changing habits with sudden bursts of action can never sustain the type of willpower required to see true, lasting, change.
According to director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford, BJ Fogg, it is the “tiny, specific habits that create big changes in behaviour”.
Small steps consistently taken in the same direction, with the same goal in mind, together build permanent lifestyle habits/changes. And, opposite to unreasonable demands and extreme actions that most often overwhelm and disappoint, often leading to defeat, small steps are doable steps. Each step accomplished builds more resolve to reach the next. It is a self-motivating activity. Like a bank account or financial investment, small action steps have a compounding effect and work together to impact enormous change. The same way our bank account grows through compounding interest, our habits increase and get stronger with each repetition.
According to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits:
■ Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
■ These small changes may not set our world on fire initially, but, over time, provide the ammo for long-lasting tangible lifestyle changes. Done consistently, they create new habits empowered to lift and upgrade our overall quality of life.
Creating new healthier habits is not easy and does not happen overnight. It takes will power, dedication, determination, laser focus (keeping our “eye on the ball”) and lots of tenacity to patiently stick with things no matter the weather.
Assuming a healthy diet and challenging exercise are already in place (if not, that might be the first place to implement a change – mindful eating for example?) … why not try a few simple, behavioural, habit changes and see if they do not help add years to your life and life to your years.
Drastic actions never lead to permanent positive lifestyle changes/habits for anyone.