There are so many factors that influence someone’s ability to successfully change their behaviour and adopt healthy habits. However, there are certain strategies that are proven to be more helpful than others in supporting lasting lifestyle changes. In my view, three key approaches stand out: advance planning, monitoring your progress, and reflecting on your experiences. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they are the three apostles of healthy lifestyle change!
In this article, I’ll discuss why these strategies are so vital for improving health and wellbeing and provide some suggestions for practical tools you can use to help you plan, monitor, and reflect more effectively.
Planning
Have you heard of the saying “fail to plan, plan to fail?” Well, whilst I think this might be a bit of a black and white way of looking at things, I do believe that there’s some merit to it. Planning is a really important step when making healthy lifestyle changes, but we often skip this stage and jump straight to the ‘doing’. Taking action is obviously great, but if we’re not totally clear about what we’re wanting to achieve and haven’t thought about the steps we need to take to achieve our goals, we’ll be less likely to succeed.
Here's an example for you. If you were wanting to start incorporating more exercise into your weekly routine, taking action might involve suddenly going on daily walks and committing to three exercise classes a week. The intention behind this is great, but if you were doing very little to start with, then going from zero to a hundred overnight can feel overwhelming and is often difficult to maintain. This can then impact on motivation if you don’t achieve what you hoped you would straight away.
A better approach would be to spend some time planning how you intend to reach your overarching aim and to set yourself some smaller, more achievable goals to work towards and build upon over time. This might look like one or two walks for the first couple of weeks and then gradually increasing your activity levels after that. Whilst this approach might take longer to get going, you’ll be more likely to stick with it in the long run, once you’ve embedded the new behaviours in your daily routine.
Advanced planning is going to look different for everyone depending on your goals, but it could include SMART goal setting, weekly planning, getting clear on daily priorities, or scheduling activities in your calendar. It’s really just about getting intentional about what you plan to do and clarifying the specifics of when and how those activities are going to happen.
Monitoring
Keeping track of your progress is hugely important when trying to establish new behaviours and habits, as it’s often easy to overlook how much progress you’ve made or to get stuck focusing on one ‘off’ day. If you’re having a particularly challenging day, or couple of days, when you’ve not been able to prioritise your goals, it can be easy to lose sight of all the successes that have come before. It’s therefore important to zoom out and to look at the broader picture in these moments. It’s a bit like the weather – some days it’s grey and cloudy, but that doesn’t mean it’s always like that. If you zoom out and focus on the overall climate instead, you’ll be able to see all the sunny days too.
You can monitor your progress in various different ways. This might be by using a habit tracking app or printable worksheet, it might be by recording key measurements or milestones (e.g., daily steps walked, miles run, days meditated), or it might be by keeping a reflective account of how you feel and the progress you’re making in a journal of some sort. However you decide to monitor your behaviour, doing so is an effective way to help you maintain motivation in the long run.
Monitoring your progress can also help you to gain valuable insight into your patterns of behaviour that might be linked to your mood or emotions. For example, do you tend to eat more when you are feeling sad or low? Or do you go to bed later when you’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed? It can sometimes be difficult to draw links between what’s going on for us emotionally and how that might be impacting our health behaviour. It can therefore be valuable to keep track of this if you feel like this is something that affects your ability to make healthy choices. Try using a mood tracker or a food and mood tracker to help monitor and identify patterns of behaviour that might otherwise go overlooked.
Reflecting
The only way to progress and become healthier, happier versions of ourselves is by reflecting on the way we think and behave. I would argue that this is important in all aspects of our lives, but it’s also highly relevant to our health and wellbeing. We can sometimes get stuck in a loop of doing the same thing on repeat, even if it’s not helping us move closer towards our goals. Taking time to reflect on what we’re doing and to consider whether it’s serving us, can help give us greater clarity about our path forward and what we might need to do differently.
Carving out time at the end of each week to reflect on the past seven days can be a really valuable exercise. You might want to think about what went well, or if things felt challenging, why that was. What lessons have you learnt that week that you could carry into the next? What small tweaks could you make to improve your ability to support yourself, mentally and physically, going forwards? As with the other approaches, there are various ways to do this: you might want to just sit and think about the answers to these questions, you might want to spend some time journalling, or you might prefer to use a structured reflection sheet, such as this one.
Practical tools for effective planning, monitoring, and reflection
I’ve provided various suggestions throughout this article for practical tools you can use to help plan, monitor, and reflect upon your behaviour, but to summarise: You could use apps to help you track and monitor your habits and progress, you might want to use a journal or notebook to record any key measurements, milestones, or reflections, or you might want to use more structured worksheets and templates to help support you to do this. If the latter is something that sounds appealing, I have a selection of printable worksheets available in my online store, which you can check out here.
However you chose to do it, it’d just encourage you to prioritise each of these strategies when making any kind of lifestyle change, to increase your likelihood of success in improving your health and wellbeing.
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