Create a Health Habit

Habits have a kind of magic to them. Once you build one, on purpose or by accident, it begins to have a power of its own. It will guide your choices whether you think about it or not. Most of our health choices are ruled by habits, like the kinds of food we tend to eat, how much exercise we get, or when we tend to go to bed.

You can be the master of your habits, and you can create new ones. The trick is to set a clear, achievable goal for yourself, to create a plan for when you’ll develop the habit and what kind of reward you’ll give yourself, and to make it social in some way. When you realize that you can create new habits, you’ll see that you have the power to change yourself in almost any way.

Getting Started: Your health habit could be about food (something you want to eat more of, or less of), it could be a form of exercise, an amount of sleep, or almost anything else. You could track how many push-ups you can do, or how many days in a row you play basketball, or how many days in a row you skip having soda. The important thing is learning how to create a habit; with luck you will develop many health habits over the course of your life, with some fading away when no longer useful, and others becoming fundamental to your health and happiness.

There are four things you’ll need to create your habit:

1. A Specific Goal: It’s important to make your goal as clear and detailed as possible; otherwise it may be hard to know if you’re getting closer to it. Make sure you include how you’re going to measure your progress, and a specific time when you hope to have realized the goal. For example: “I want to be able to do 50 push-ups by the time the next school year starts. I’ll write down on my calendar how many I did each day.”

2. A Reminder: We all need help to stay focused on a goal, especially when it’s something that we aren’t used to yet. Create specific reminders for yourself that you will see every day. It’s ideal if you try your habit at the same time and at the same place every day, so that your mind begins to connect that time and place with the habit. For example: “I’ll put a big sign on the outside of my bedroom door so that when I get home from school each day, I’ll remember to do my push-ups.”

3. A Friend: Goals are more powerful when you share them with others who will be supportive, and update them on your progress as you go. Sometimes when you don’t feel like working on it, knowing that your friend will ask, or looking forward to telling your mentor that you’ve met the goal, will give that essential extra boost of motivation. For example: “My friend agreed to work on a similar goal for the summer and we text each other each day with how many push-ups we did.”

4. A Reward: It helps to have some kind of reward to motivate ourselves; the best rewards are ones you feel internally, like feeling healthier or stronger, or feeling proud of yourself for having mastered something that used to be out of reach. For example: “My reward is that I’ll feel stronger and will feel more confident as my record number of push-ups increases. Plus, seeing the look on my principal’s face when I can do more push-ups than him!”

With these in mind, you can choose one health area you would like to improve, and identify the goal, reminder, friend, and reward to make a new habit. Once you get the hang of this, you’ll find that habits aren’t things that happen to you, they are tools you create to make the life you want.