I’ve had to learn these the hard way. They’ve been the difference between me struggling to build foundational health habits for most of my adult life – to now having over a handful that I can easily be consistent with.
Before we jump in, I want to give a quick warning.
Most of these rules are going to be different to what you might instinctively want to do – or perhaps advice you’ve heard from other experts. That’s actually good news. Because it presents an opportunity for you to think about things in a different way, and to have a breakthrough. And most importantly, to start getting the results you want.
Let’s jump straight into the first rule.
- Focus on one habit at a time
Building a new habit is hard. It becomes exponentially harder when trying to do several at the same time. In fact, I’d argue it’s mostly impossible. And, trust me, I’ve tried hundreds of times before, and I haven’t managed it yet. I bet you have too.
When you’re trying to build a new habit, you’re essentially trying to do something completely new, or trying to change an existing behavior that’s deeply ingrained. So, it needs your full attention and focus if you’re going to be successful with it.
When I first started my habit journey, there were times where I would try to focus on two or three habits at the same time. And all I found is that I would do a bit better, or a bit worse at all of them. I never managed to build any habits with that approach.
It took me a while to realise that it’s better to let some habits tread water – or even languish – so you can focus all of your efforts on getting one habit completely down. The good news is that once a habit is established, it takes a fraction of the effort to maintain it. You can then easily keep it up, whilst you turn your attention to the next habit you want to build.
For example, nowadays, it’s easy for me to maintain six foundational health habits. These were initially very hard to build. But, now they are built, I can spend most of my time focusing on building my next new habit. This is a great place to be. But, it’s a place you’ll never get to, if you try to work on more than one habit at a time.
In fact, I nearly made this mistake recently. Right now, my focus is on my whole foods foundational health habit. It’s a new habit, so I’m in the early stages of finding it very hard and working out strategies to improve my consistency.
At the same time, I really want to improve working on my mobility, which will mean making it a daily habit.
I was tempted to try and work on both whole foods and mobility at the same time. I actually nearly convinced myself that because there is virtually no overlap between whole foods and mobility, I would be capable of working on both at the same time. But, I caught myself in the moment. I reminded myself that eating whole foods is a much higher priority. Until I get that under control, I can’t allow myself to focus on anything else. It needs all of my focus.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do other stuff, outside of the one habit you’re focusing on. For example, I will still be doing mobility. But, importantly I don’t have any fixed expectations and it isn’t a main focus for me.
What you’ll usually find is that the things you’re not focusing on, they will marginally improve anyway. Case in point, I actually had my best week for mobility last week.
So that’s the first rule – focus on one habit at a time
- Start small, and then scale in difficulty over time
When you start trying to build a new habit, every bone in your body is going to want to jump straight to the gold standard.
Right, I’ve had enough of never going to the gym – starting next week I’ll go every day.
OR
I’m so sick of eating desserts in the evening – starting tomorrow, I’m giving up sugar.
Sound familiar?
There is a fatal flaw with this approach.
It’s simply too much, too soon. The difficulty curve is far too high. The chances of being able to learn and maintain consistency like this, is virtually zero. You’ll likely last a few days – a few weeks at absolute best.
That’s because optimal learning occurs just outside one’s comfort zone.
In fact, there’s a clever psychologist called Lev Vygotsky who called this the zone of proximal development. [1] He built a model called the learning zone model, which has three layers to it – the comfort zone, the learning zone and the panic zone.
His theory is that in order to learn successfully, we need to be challenged – but it’s a fine line.
You want to push yourself out of the first zone (your comfort zone), and get into the second zone (the learning zone). In the learning zone, you are definitely going to feel some pressure, but it’s a healthy place to learn and be successful. Importantly, because you are learning and being successful, it feels motivating to be in the learning zone.
When you make things too difficult, you move out of the learning zone, and fall into the third zone (the panic zone). This is a bad place to be. It feels horrible and it’s hard to learn and be successful here
So, you want to be in the learning zone. This is the “sweet spot’, where you feel challenged and are able to learn.
Let me bring it back to a practical example.
For each of the six foundational health habits I’ve built, I’ve had to learn a number of things along the journey – each being critical to the knowledge I now have that allows me to be consistent with the habit.
Protein is a good example. My goal is 150 grams of protein per day. This is now easy for me, and my average is almost always upwards of 180 grams. In fact that’s a good reminder for me to now change my target to 175 grams of protein – a gram per lb of bodyweight. This was always my gold standard for protein.
If I had tried to go for 150 or 175 grams immediately, it would have been mind boggling to conceive how to eat that much protein.
So, instead, I initially focused on 100 grams. At first this was hard, but I was able to spot some fundamental strategies for how to achieve it. Soon enough, I was comfortably eating over 100 grams of protein every day.
I then increased my target to 150 grams, which stretched me out of my comfort zone, and put me into the learning zone again. Things just went from easy, to hard – but not too hard. I was able to see ways to help me build into eating just over 100 grams of protein, to now 150 grams of protein.
Since then, I’ve been able to optimise things even further, to now fairly comfortably being able to eat on average 180 grams of protein a day.
If you look back on that journey, you’ll notice three key learning phases. The foundational strategies with my first goal of 100 grams. Then, new learnings that helped me to reach 150 grams. And then further optimisations to get to 180 grams.
None of these would have taken place if I had just tried to jump immediately to 180 grams. It would have been so far out of my comfort zone, that I would have burned out and failed hard.
- Be patient
If you google ‘how long does it take to build a habit?’, you’ll get a range of answers.
21 days
30 days
45 days
66 days
I’ll tell you right now, these are all completely wrong.
The right answer is ‘it depends’ – depends on the person, the habit, the environment, how ambitious the habit is etc.
But I’ll say this – it’s definitely going to take longer than you want, so you need to be patient.
As we’ve already talked about, most habits are about trying to do something completely new, or trying to change an existing behavior that’s deeply ingrained. In a lot of cases, the habit goes against our personality. If it didn’t, we’d be naturally doing it anyway.
If you’re going to work through the incremental stages of building a habit (like we just talked about), it could easily take 4-6 months to firmly establish it at the level you ideally want. Sure, it might happen quicker than that, and you’ll certainly get incremental wins along the way – but you can’t be in a rush.
We’re talking about building foundational health habits that will be with you for a LIFETIME. They are going to give you results for many decades to come. So, 4-6 months in the grand scheme of things is NOTHING. In fact, it’s an incredible return on investment of your time.
Rushing will only cause you to take shortcuts. In the worst case scenario, it will lead to failing and frustration – and giving up entirely. This is how most new year’s resolutions go. In the best case scenario, you’ll simply have to start again and things will ultimately take even longer.
Being patient is something I’m having to live at the moment. I’m in my second month of working on a new habit – eating 80% whole foods. Last month I hit 45% consistency, and this month I’m going to come in about 50%. I’m right in the early stages of seeing where my baseline is, and starting to figure out some of the foundational strategies needed to take the jump to 60 and 70% consistency.
I know this habit in particular is going to be perhaps my toughest and longest yet – and that’s because I historically have a bad relationship with food.
I’m starting to get my head around the fact that this might even take the rest of 2024 for me to be able to reach 80% consistency. But, I’m ready for the journey. If I can nail this habit, it will bring me huge health benefits in my forties, fifties and for the rest of my life.
- Track daily, using a physical tick sheet
I’ve covered the power of tracking daily habits with a physical tick sheet in previous episodes, so I won’t labor the point too much here.
Just know, using a physical tick sheet to track your consistency is so powerful that it will often be the difference between success or failure. This is because it acts as a visual cue, keeping the habit in plain sight many times throughout the day.
Ultimately, this raises your self awareness of the habit. This helps remind you throughout the day to take action. It also helps you adjust your behavior as you notice strong or weak periods of consistency, and also what’s working and not working. Lastly, it’s very motivating to be able to see your progress over a longer period.
Here’s a good example of how using my physical tick sheet is helping me stay on track with my habits this month.
When I’ve missed a habit on any given day this month, it quickly becomes very obvious to me. That’s because I now have to look at a big fat cross right in front of me multiple times a day. When this happens, I feel compelled to double down the following day, so as to not clock up two consecutive misses. As a result, with the exception of whole foods, I haven’t missed any of my habits two days in a row so far this month.
As with everything I talk about, I walk the talk. I have 27 physical habit sheets that represent the last 27 months of my habit tracking.
- Find a mentor, or someone on the same journey
Finding someone who is either trying to do something similar, and / or, someone who has already been successful with what you’re trying to do, can make everything much, much easier.
It creates a structure of accountability. This will massively increase your chances of success. You’re going to find yourself working hard to avoid not doing what you committed to.
You might also find it fun and challenging being in competition with an accountability partner. This can help stretch you further than you might ordinarily do on your own.
You’ll also learn at an accelerated pace. When you go through the journey with a peer or peers, you’ll exchange learnings along the way. And if you’re working with a mentor, you’ll be able to get advice from someone who has already been where you are, often just at the right time.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve become very close to a good friend of mine, Rich. We’re both on a similar journey to becoming healthier, better versions of ourselves. What’s great about this, is our goals and plans overlap quite a lot.
I can say without doubt that I am further along in my own journey, through being able to share ideas, have some friendly competition, and through the structure of accountability I have with Rich.
So, if you can find an accountability partner, or someone who can be a mentor for you, it’s well worth it. It can speed the whole journey up.
So, there you have it – five rules for building rock solid foundational health habits.
Let’s do a bit of a recap.
- Focus on one habit at a time
- Start small, and then scale in difficulty over time
- Be patient
- Track daily, using a physical tick sheet
- Find a mentor, or someone on the same journey
If you’re missing any of these, you’re going to find it very hard to build foundational health habits in your life. You might even struggle to ever build any.
But, if you have these 5 rules in place, you’re going to do very well.
One last piece of advice.I said at the beginning, most of these rules are going to be different to what you might instinctively want to do – or perhaps advice you’ve heard from other experts.
You have to fight against this and be willing to go against your natural instincts.
You WILL want to focus on more than one habit at a time.
You WILL want to start with the gold standard of the habit you want to build.
You WILL be impatient, and think the habit will be far easier and quicker to build than it will actually take.
You WILL be tempted to skip tracking your habits daily on a physical sheet – because it’s a bit of a hassle.
And you WILL be tempted to skip finding a peer or mentor to help you. You can do this on your own right?
Wrong on all counts.
Write these rules down, and follow them. I guarantee it will change everything for you.
I’ll finish with some suggestions for a practical next step, to get you going:
- Pick one habit that you want to establish. Write it down
- Make it smaller enough, that it will require you to get out of your comfort zone (but not too much)
- Create a physical tick sheet for the month, that you can mark each day with either a tick or a cross. Put it somewhere very visible where you will see it multiple times in the day (you can find an example template of mine in the show notes [2])
And then go for it.
Feel free to drop me an email with how you’re doing. I’m here to help if you need it.
Notes:
[1] The Learning Zone Model by Lev Vygotsky
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