Why do you keep failing with your health goals?
It sounds good on paper, you decide from tomorrow I am a new person. From next Monday, next month, next year I am going to eat better, stop smoking, reduce alcohol intake, stress less. And yet by day 9 (in average) you find yourself back in your old habits.
So how it is possible that we can’t achieve our heath goals? How is it possible that new Year’s resolutions fail every single year? In my opinion, it’s not just “life”. It’s not that life happens, I believe there are more reasons why we “fail”.
Here are some of them:
- “I want it all and I want it now”- one of the biggest reasons why we don’t go through with our set up goals is that we are setting up very realistic goals in usually a very short amount of time. We don’t think in terms of long term but short term basis. In order to actually change a habit it is wiser to go week by week with a small goal that you can achieve. One week you exercise a bit more, the next you remove sugar, the third you decide to have one drink less and so on. It’s the small steps that make up the whole picture.
- The immediacy of now-the main problem with most bad habits is that the costs occur in the future, whereas the pleasures from them occur in the present.The consequences of bad habits will come over a long time and we are unable to realize how serious it is in the moment. That is why we decide to postpone, procrastinate and start over and over again.
- All or nothing mentality- this type of thinking is doomed to fail. We are not perfect, there is no perfection, the only way to move forward towards achieving any goal is to understand that overall progress counts more. Overall progress means: expect a learning curve, progress and relapse as part of the learning journey.
- Unhelpful core beliefs- we all have beliefs about ourselves, the world that we learned and adopted at a very young age. If your core beliefs are negative ( “i don’t deserve this”, “i am not enough”, “I am not worthy of this or that”) then all your emotions and therefore behaviors will align with these thoughts. You will make life choices that will 100% support these beliefs
- Past traumas-often many traumas that can haunt us for decades later start in ones childhood. Codependency, lack of attachment, abuse, neglect, abandonment and others often create the feeling that we are not enough, that we are not worthy and consequently it makes it harder for us to make changes in our life.