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The way you live on a daily basis will have a big impact on how you feel overall. If you strive for a healthy balance in life, you’ll feel more positive and your mental health will be greater than someone who isn’t looking after themselves. Unfortunately, throughout life, you will have your ups which are great, and your lows which aren’t so great. When you are going through a down period, it’s important you identify this and work on it, in order to help turn things around.
Making changes to your lifestyle could be a big part of changing the way you feel. If you have been taking drugs, detoxing from drugs could help improve how you feel. So does improving your diet, exercising more, and increasing the number of hours you sleep. The challenge can be sticking to the changes you want to make.
Making lifestyle changes takes dedication. This is why it’s important to make your changes realistic and you should not change too many behaviors at one time – you don’t want to set yourself up to fail. To help you with making lifestyle changes easier, we have put some tips together below.
Set realistic goals
Rule number one when setting up any goals in life is to make them realistic. Do not set yourself up to fail before you’ve even tried making a change. If you are not setting realistic goals, you’ll soon find yourself struggling to motivate yourself as every day you are failing. When setting your goals, set smaller targets within the big target and celebrate when you hit those small milestones. This way you can feel a sense of achievement when reaching those goals and want to continue in order to better yourself to reach your overall target.
Track your progress
Don’t set yourself a target and just hope for the best. Imagine saying you were going to run a marathon in six months but never tracked your training and just guessed when to go on your training runs – it would be impossible. When setting your realistic goals, track your progress daily or weekly in order to know you are doing your best. Depending on what your lifestyle change is, there may be an app out there that you can use to track your progress. The simplest apps to use would be your notes on your phone or your calendar as you will always have your phone on you. Then after a few weeks or months of making the changes, you can look back through your notes to see the progress you have made. If you are trying to improve your diet you’ll find plenty of specialist apps out there for example.
Change one behavior at a time
Don’t go guns blazing and try to change everything at once. This isn’t realistic and although you may set a realistic goal for each change, you will ultimately fail as you are trying to make too many changes at once. Instead, change one behavior at a time. By doing this you can really track it and realistically make good progress on changing this lifestyle trait. Once you’ve been working on it for a few months, you can then slowly start to add another change that you would like to make. Once a change has been done for long enough, it will become a habit instead of you trying to actively change it.
Create a plan
As the saying goes “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”. When setting your realistic goal, create a plan that follows. Depending on what lifestyle changes you are trying to make, this plan can include daily, weekly and monthly targets for you to achieve. When making your plan, think about how much time you can dedicate to this change, the cost of it, any research that you will need to carry out, and the commitment it’s going to need. This plan will help you in deciding if your goal is realistic. It may be that it’s harder than anticipated – that said, you should never give up.
Find a lifestyle partner
Whenever you are making any sort of changes in life, it’s always easier if you have someone there who will do it with you. Whether it’s your partner, your friend, or a family member, try to find someone who is going to make the same lifestyle change as you. This way you can both motivate each other to achieve it and hold each other accountable when you are starting to slip. It always means you have someone else to talk to when going through the journey who will understand how you are feeling and be able to support you as you can support them.
Ask for support
Never feel afraid to ask for support if you need it. When making your lifestyle changes, tell your friends and family members so that they can help and support you through the process. If you are trying to drink less, they can help by not offering you a drink when you are around for dinner. If you are trying to lose weight, they may cook a healthier meal instead of ordering a takeaway, etc. They may also know others who are going through the same process and be able to give you some good advice. As well as asking your family and friends, reaching out to a professional may also help. If the changes you are trying to make are more in-depth than imagined, they will have helped others through the changes and be able to assist you.
We hope the tips give you some insight into making lifestyle changes easier and more achievable for you. Whatever change you are wanting to make, know you can do it and believe in yourself.
What tips do you have for making a lifestyle change easier? Are there any tips that we haven’t included that you think we should add? Which of the above tips did you find most useful? Is there anything you would like to share that will benefit our readers? Let us know in the comment box below.
