Habits Challenge: Week One
Welcome to the Habits Challenge! Changing your habits can bring plenty of benefits, but it can sometimes be difficult to either get started or to keep going long enough for the new habit to become second nature.
That’s why Week One is all about ‘Making it Easier for Yourself.’
We’re starting with lots of simple, easy ideas to create structure or calm, or remove various obstacles from our own path. All you have to do is decide what your main priority is, and try out the idea (or ideas, if you decide to use more than one) for a week to see if it helps.
Everyone’s different, so it’s okay to try a few things out to see which works best for you. Think of all the different themes as part of a bigger experiment, or a process that can be fine tuned over time. Trial and error can be very useful indeed, and we can learn a lot from it.
Sometimes we need to give ourselves a little push in the right direction, and sometimes we need to get things out of the way. Occasionally, we might benefit from doing both of those things at the same time.
Pick a habit: Start simply and start small
Choose a relatively small habit that you’d like to make, a habit that you’d like to strengthen, or something you’d like to reduce or stop. Don’t go all-in just yet, such as giving up smoking overnight or starting marathon training if you haven’t exercised for fifteen years.
The idea is to choose something that’s simple, achievable and specific. It can be fun, or even downright silly – it doesn’t necessarily have to feel like a chore.
The subject area is completely up to you, but here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Eating more fruit or vegetables
- Going to bed earlier
- Spending less time on social media
- Taking some/more exercise
- Learning a new language
- Drinking more water
- Reading more books
- Dance more often
- Making time to de-stress
- Sticking to a budget
- Putting on sunscreen in the morning
I’m sure you can come up with multiple ideas of your own, but remember to keep it small and simple. It’s only Week One. Just for this one week, choose something you can do every day.
Once you have your theme, it’s time to come up with the specifics. The more specific you are, the easier it will be to know you’ve done exactly what you set out to do.
For example, let’s say you’ve decided to ‘eat more fruit and/or vegetables’. Exactly what do you mean personally when you say ‘more’ here? Be specific, and remember to make it simple and easy.
This depends on you, your lifestyle, your budget, your preferences, and your digestive system! Perhaps you could look at what you usually eat daily, and decide to have one more portion (around 80g or so) per day, either as a snack or as part of one of your meals. That’s not too much of a shock to the system, and most of us would say it sounds manageable.
As far as timing goes, remember this is just for one week. So, using the ‘eat more fruit/veg’ example, it’s ‘eat one extra portion of fruit/veg per day for one week.’
Afterwards we’ll take a moment to pause and think about what worked, and maybe what didn’t, before deciding next steps.
A little push in the right direction
Now it’s time to think about accentuating the positive, and making things even easier for yourself. Think up a few ideas for ways that you can help yourself along with this new habit.
What can you put in place that’ll help you?
Going back to our example of ‘eat more fruit & veg’ you could try any of these:
- Put a fruit bowl on the kitchen counter or living room table.
- Buy a ‘banana guard’ so you can keep fruit in your bag.
- Buy washed mini carrots for snacks, or prep carrot sticks and keep them in the fridge.
- Have three portions of veg with dinner instead of two.
- Buy frozen fruit and defrost it overnight for putting on your breakfast.
- Make a side salad every day.
- Add extra veg or fruit to your repeat list for online grocery shopping.
I’m sure you can come up with plenty of other ideas, large and small. Focus on how you can make it more convenient for yourself to do this new habit, so it nudges you in the right direction.
Habits Challenge: Removing a barrier or two
Sometimes it’s more important to ‘eliminate the negative’ and remove an obstacle instead.
Have a really good think about anything that might get in the way of your new habit. Common factors include:
- Being rushed or stressed.
- Feeling tired.
- Being in the habit of doing something else at a certain time.
- Lack of funds.
- Lack of equipment.
Get creative, and think of ways to troubleshoot or get around any possible problems. Thinking positive is generally helpful, but you might also need to think about what might trip you up.
General solutions to get you started:
- Choosing your timing – for example, getting things ready the night before.
- Making a one-off prep time: put something on a shelf, hanger, or in the fridge/freezer.
- Using something that blocks you or cuts you off (apps, alerts, timer locks, etc.)
- Choosing an alternative activity or a distraction.
- Removing specific distractions from your home, cupboards, phone, or work desk.
- Improvising: temporary storage, free software, water bottle, and so on.
Week One: Pause & evaluate
Whatever you choose, try it every day for a week. See how you get on.
Then decide whether you want to carry on as you are, make modifications, ramp it up, or drop it completely and try something else instead.
One small point to remember: not everyone responds well to small habit changes. You might have better results with a radical change, or a short term project.
That’s not failing, it’s being an individual, so don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s also why we’ll be trying different types of habit change for Weeks Two, Three and Four.
