The Key to Keeping New Year’s Resolutions? Set The Bar Low – and start in February!

Did you make NY’s resolutions? Are they beginning to fade away already?

There are definitely 2 camps of people – those that make NY’s resolutions every year without fail – even if they always seem to be the same ones, and those that don’t, as they say they never work anyway. As physiotherapists and in the business of encouraging and helping people to make changes in their lives, we are always interested in the subject of new habit formation and the best ways to go about this. There is quite a lot of overlap with the New Year’s Resolutions concept and encouraging people to make new habits to help their health or rehabilitation.

There are lots of books and self-help guides on the subject of habit-forming and the most recent one we’ve come across and one that resonated a lot is BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits. His take-home messages based on his Stanford Behaviour Design Lab’s research were as follows:

• Motivation on it’s own isn’t enough to make lasting changes. Sustainable change only comes about with doing the same behaviour day-in, day-out.

• Human behaviour is driven by both what we’re motivated to do and what we can do.

• To achieve meaningful change in your life start with small behavioural changes, make them well within your ability to achieve them and in this way hard-wire them into your daily routine.

• Tie this new habit to something you do already to act as a ‘action prompt’ and that reminds you to do it. For example, if you want to regularly do some push-up exercise or squats to improve your upper and lower body strength, you could tie this into doing just 5 of each when you boil the kettle for a cup of tea. Try and tie in the prompt to the location and frequency of the new behaviour you are trying to adopt. In this way you can ‘piggy-back’ your new habit with your existing, established one and improve your chances of success.

Why start in February? – Well, we’re all inundated with good advice and intentions in January – dry January; post-Xmas diets; as well as back to work; cold, dark days; the list goes on. Why not start with some easy new habits in February that you can incorporate into your everyday routine and achieve lasting changes.

Let us know how you get on and if there’s anything that we can do to help you with a rehab goal or a niggling injury that is stopping you just get in touch!

"Thank you so much for fixing my leg!"

AJ