6 mistakes people make when trying to get healthy
Good health should be simple. We implement a bunch of healthy behaviours over a consistent period of time and our health improves. Basic right?
BUT
We’re really good at making things harder for ourselves. We do things that get in the way of good health. And I realise that it isn’t all just us, the context in which we live our lives doesn’t always make the healthiest choice the easiest choice.
But to focus on ways that we can make things easier, let's explore 6 common mistakes we make when trying to improve our health.
Play the short game
We want things now. Convenience is important, think paywave, remote controls, apps on your phone that will deliver dinner to your door. It’s why things like 6 week bikini body bootcamps are so popular. We want that health outcome and we want it right NOW!
But health is the ultimate long game, it’s with us right up until we die. When we go hard in the short term we can often achieve pretty great results, but when that short term burst finishes we often find it’s not a sustainable way of living and we haven’t made it a habit so we revert back to what we’ve always done.
We blindly follow someone else’s plan
Having support to improve your health is great. Great support and protocols can remove a lot of barriers to becoming healthier. Where support becomes a problem is when the advice or program or protocol that we are following isn’t adapted to our life context. This adds friction to implementing health practices. Rigorously trying to stick to someone else’s plan often leads to increasing difficulty getting it done.
We don’t define what good health looks like for us
“I’d like to lose a couple of kgs”, “I’d like to feel a bit healthier” are common things that I hear when asking people what good health looks like, and often it doesn’t go any further than that. Maybe you’ll get a “Chris Hemsworth in Thor, but not the fat one” response. If we don’t actually have a vision of good health then often won’t make any significant progress towards it.
We ignore our values
Even if we define what Good health means to us and set about working towards it, the activities we try to move us in that direction may not feel meaningful. They aren’t things that we actually LIKE doing.
Good Health might mean being able to pick your kids up and carry them around, but if you despise the gym then that’s probably not the right course of action to get you to that health outcome. You might be better served by heading out for a bushwalk carrying a loaded backpack because you love being in nature (and it’ll chill you out too). You’re much more likely to stick with an activity that you value.
We ignore our life context
You’re busy, I’m busy, we’ve got lots of shit on. One of the reasons we don’t work on health is that it’s a bit overwhelming trying to fit it into our schedules. 10 day silent meditation retreats, 10 hours a week at the gym, or spending 90 minutes cooking up a delicious but time consuming dinner every night is probably not going to work for us. Whatever we choose it has to work with our lives, not fight against them. Yes we will need to move things around to make health a priority, but if we’re trying to overhaul our whole life at once it’s going to be pretty tough to get into action.
We don’t deploy enough self-compassion
Change is hard. Health change is hard, and it’s often an emotional hot button for people. No one’s health progress is linear, life has a habit of getting in the way of our best laid plans. What I hear from people when this happens is that they start to beat themselves up for “not being good enough” or think that “it’s all too hard” and go back to their old behaviours. Self-compassion tells us that we’re (probably) trying our best, things are going to be really hard sometimes and we aren’t always going to nail it perfectly, but that’s OK and we’ll get another go tomorrow.
