"Too much of a good thing": Take one small action at a time.

The key to starting a new lifestyle is simple, small and one thing at a time.

Did you know the monarch butterfly flies 3000 miles from the western U.S. to central Mexico?

How does it do it?

ONE FLAP AT A TIME.

When you have decided to change your lifestyle, has it not happened to you that you want to change everything at once? You start seeing the rooms of your life that could be improved, and then suddenly, you have ideas about how to start changing everything. You start getting motivated, you start taking steps forward, and you begin to see results. However, after a while, it is challenging to keep everything up, and it ends up in you dropping the whole project. Sounds that familiar?

The intentions were fantastic, and the motivation was there, so… you might ask yourself, "What happened"? Why (once again) can I not stick to my intended healthy habits?"

When we want to change our lifestyle, we need to be aware that we are dealing with habits, these subconscious behavioural patterns that lead most of our lives. In other words, those actions that we do in automatic pilot. They are possible to change, but we need to know how we function to help ourselves to change.

Luckily, science has been doing a great job of researching and discovering what helps people change their habits. Many strategies and techniques have been proven to help people change their behaviour. One of them is implementation intentions (1). This technique involves planning the specific circumstances under which the desired behaviour will be done. In other words, you decide WHAT you want to do, WHEN, and WHERE.

Let's start with the WHAT.

Choosing what habit to start with, it is recommended that you also start with small and simple actions. Goals usually take a series of steps to become one. But you do not execute the big plan straight away. You start using the building blocks to build the desired behaviour. Those building blocks are the little actions you perform regularly, and they must be small, simple and strategic.

For example, you want to start with doing meal prep. Doing meal prep is by itself already a big skill, whereas many other actions need to take place before starting to cook several meals at once. Before meal prepping becomes a habit, it is a skill that needs to be practised.

We could divide the meal prep habit/skill into a series of steps:

• Decide the meals you want to eat.

• Look for the ingredients you need for those meals.

• Do a shopping list.

• Decide when to go to the supermarket.

• Go to the supermarket and buy the stuff.

• Decide when you are going to cook the meals.

• Cook the meals and store them as it is more convenient for you.

• Take the meal and pack it if you are planning to eat it somewhere else.

• Enjoy your meal!

Step 1: Choose a small action that is realistic, approachable and in a logical order.

The WHEN and WHERE.

Let's say you have chosen the action of Deciding what meals to eat. The next step is to plan when and where you will do the brainstorming.

Example: You look at your calendar and see it is realistic and approachable to make it available to sit at your dinner table (Where) on a Monday evening at 8 pm (When).

That is the only thing you will focus on executing the planned action. When you plan it, the chances that you will take action increase, and it is easier for you to stay committed. When the time comes, you will know what to do.

You might ask yourself, why just do that? Why stick to just one thing?

When we focus on tiny actions and planning them, it facilitates staying committed. Since we plan to build habits, there must be consistency in our actions. If we plan too big and difficult, the commitment gets weaker, and the chance to execute them is reduced (2). We want to practice as much as possible those small actions to build a skill, which will later become a habit and, later on, part of our identity (3). Frequent practice is the key to building habits. If we do not practice those tiny actions regularly, we do not build the lifestyle we want.

But to practice, we need to help ourselves and know ourselves. Science demonstrates that the chances of doing the action are reduced if there is a significant energy requirement to do the activity (4). Therefore, finding a simple and easy way to start a series of steps to build and maintain a habit is essential. Try to make the starting step as simple as possible so that the required energy is so tiny that it does not ask much of yourself.

However, science also demonstrates it is possible to build different goals simultaneously. But, as said before, the actions must be small and easy to execute to stay committed, and there is no interference in goal achievement. The more focused you are on one thing, your chances to succeed are higher. If you decide to work on different things simultaneously (recommended is at most 3 new actions (5) ), make your actions small, simple and in the proper order. And start building your habits from that. Later, you will see the ripple effect of those tiny actions on other areas of your life.

This is not a one-size-fits-all, but like good science, it is about trial and error. Scientists come to conclusions by trying something out and then proving the methods and results with validity, reliability, and objectivity. The best science that you can apply is the one with yourself. Decide one small action you would like to do, try it, practice it and see what results you get. If it works, keep doing it and build upon it; if not, reflect on what can be changed, learn from it, and adjust.

And remember, one flap at a time!

Resources

1. Gollwitzer, P. (1999). Implementation Intentions. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493-503.

2. Dalton, A., & Spiller, S. (2012). Too Much of a Good Thing: The Benefits of Implementation Intentions Depend on the Number of Goals. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(3), 600-614.

3. Verplanken, B., & Sui, J. (2019). Habit and Identity: Behavioral, Cognitive, Affective, and Motivational Facets of an Integrated Self. Frontiers in Psychology, 10

4. https://hubermanlab.com/build-or-break-habits-using-science-based-tools/

5. Fogg, B. J. (2020). Tiny habits: the small changes that change everything. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.