Implementing Lifestyle Changes

How to Implement Lifestyle Changes

It can be very difficult to change the way you do things, especially when it’s a part of your routine. But lately I’ve realized that, somehow, I’ve been making progress towards changing my lifestyle into something I want.

So, I decided to break down how I've managed to do it and come up with a few techniques to implement a lifestyle change.

Reminders:

The most obvious one I know. But often times the hardest part of implementing a lifestyle change is to remember that you need to be doing it. Having a reminder has really helped me remember to do something I don't normally do. For example, I am terrible at drinking water consistently. I only really drink water when I’m thirsty and therefore never hit the required amount that you’re supposed to reach in a day.

So, I followed an account on twitter that notifies me to drink water every hour. (For those of you interested the account is: @bot_hydrated) There are many different apps and such that can help you with this. I just chose twitter because I can get notification on my watch which I check more often than my phone, especially at work.

And I’ve found since downloading it, for the most part, I’m better about drinking water consistently throughout the day.

Hype:

What I mean is the concept of getting yourself hyped, or excited to do something. For example, I wanted to get into the habit of stretching or doing yoga every morning. So I went out and bought myself a cute yoga mat that I was really liked that got me excited to use it and start doing the stretches.

By the time I got over the hype I had already developed the habit of stretching every morning and now it’s something I do every day.

So, finding things that get you excited to reach whatever change you want, like getting something new or pretty or functional, can help you start a lifestyle change as well.

Discipline:

Now this one is the hardest one. Pure discipline and pushing yourself to do what you might not feel like doing or just working hard at keeping something you’re already doing consistently. For example, I write, and I’ve held myself to a schedule of updating my writing at least once a week. Now this is something I obviously want to do and care about but posting something every week takes a discipline and forces me to write even if I don’t feel like it. 

Sometimes it just does take discipline and pushing yourself to get things done. That said you can still implement the other things I've mentioned in this post to remind or hype you up for doing it. For example, working out can be a daunting thing but setting reminders and time aside to do it and buying nice workout clothes, or creating a fun workout playlist can get you excited to start it. Then use discipline to just keep it going.

I know it's easier said than done, but ultimately it's necessary to properly implement a lifestyle change. 

I’m proud to say that so far, I have been able to keep my schedule and update every week.

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The most important thing to implementing a lifestyle change is starting small. You can not expect to change your entire lifestyle in one go, it needs to be a gradual and steady process. So breaking things up into more manageable bits and slowly increasing it as time goes on will help you get to where you want to go.

If you’re interested, check out my post on Organization and Goals to see how you can break things up

Overall, the main points are:

• Lifestyle changes take time and you should start out small and work up from there
• Reminders are a good way to remember that you’re trying to change things
• Hyping yourself up about doing something helps you get excited and makes doing the thing much easier
• It takes discipline to keep the momentum going once you’ve started and it’s all about pushing yourself for better

And with that, I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this post. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I hope that you were able to learn new from this!

I’ll see you in the next one :)