Have you ever decided that you are going to start making health and fitness changes but not known where to start? Your answer…tiny habits. Pardon? What the heck is a tiny habit? Well, a tiny habit is exactly what it sounds like, a very small habit or behaviour. Now, I don’t want you to dismiss tiny habits because they might be small, but they are extremely powerful when they are used right and yes they can change your life.
Have you ever started on a health and fitness journey only to watch your motivation start to deteriorate after only a short period of time? This is super common for many people and a common reason that people give but. But when we use tiny habits we aren’t relying on motivation…instead we rely on simplicity and I think that is music to most mom’s ears. Making a behaviour simple will help increase the odds of doing the behaviour. It sounds simple doesn’t it…like duh Ashlee, but I want you to scale that habit or behaviour back…waaayyy back…probably back further than you think you need to. Think about it this way…if your new behaviour or habit is complex you will need more motivation to do it…and motivation ebbs and flows. It’s high for a few days and then it drops and goes back up again. But a simple habit doesn’t require much motivation so you aren’t relying on motivation to do it, and ultimately it doesn’t require much from you at all (and let’s be real…as a mom, you only have so much of you to give). Scaling habits back and making them into tiny habits will help you beat those moments even when motivation wanes.
We also want to consider that emotions help create habits. If you are working on a new habit or behaviour and you feel a positive emotion associated with it you are more likely to do it again and it will more likely become automatic. Your brain likes this and wants to feel that emotion again. The immediacy and intensity of the emotions that you feel are linked to how quickly you will form the new habits.
So moms…the goal here when you are implementing these changes is to start really small and to celebrate when you complete the task immediately. These are the two keys to making tiny habits work for you. Tiny habits can be super effective for moms because the point is that these habits are so small that you don’t need much motivation to do them and they don’t require a lot from you. They also don’t take a huge amount of time because they are so tiny. All things that moms can struggle with when they on a health and fitness journey.
When you start implementing your tiny habits you also need to consider where they are going to fit into your day. When you know where this new habit or behaviour fits into your day it will help you form this habit more quickly. Be sure when you are implementing these tiny habits that you put them after an existing routine. This existing routine becomes an anchor point that you pair with your new behaviour.
In these early stages you are working at making the habit automatic and you are building your confidence in completing the habit. Some days you may complete your tiny habit and some days you may do more, but there is never pressure to do more than the tiny habit itself. The more you do the behaviour the more confidence your build and the more likely you are to continue doing it (see how this nice little cycle can build on itself over time).
Let me give you an example so you can truly understand how the tiny habits work. Let’s say that you want to start drinking more water…that is a great habit to start to implement into your life, but if you have never been one to drink water the thought of this might be overwhelming. So let’s make the our tiny habit filling our water bottle. Let’s place this habit right after we turn the coffee maker on in the morning (or choose something else that you do every morning). You also need a reward for completing this habit. Let’s say that you’ve decided every time you fill your water bottle you are going to put 5 cents in a jar and you are going to buy yourself a new pair of shoes when you get enough. So your habit is filling your water bottle and you are going to do that right after you turn on your coffee maker while rewarding yourself with 5 cents towards your new shoes. Now odds are that if you keep your water bottle close to you during the day that you will drink some of it (you get bonus points for this), but you have filled your water bottle and on days when you don’t drink any you’ve still achieved your tiny habit. See how the tiny habit concept works.
Tiny habits can help you make new, healthy behaviour changes, but keep in mind that they are not super ideal for getting rid of “bad” behaviours. Starting to implement tiny habits into your life will help you build your confidence and help you feel like you’re succeeding. Over time your tiny habits will compound each other and you will begin to see big results in your life. Remember that although these habits are small, they will create big changes in your life if you are patience. Health and fitness isn’t an overnight fix and if we start to implement smaller changes over longer periods of time we learn to incorporate healthy behaviours that last a lifetime.
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