People often talk about creating the life they desire. However, what they often don’t realize is that creating this life comes down to the small, individual choices that they often overlook in their daily lives. Creating the life you want comes down to your daily habits. The daily choices you make add up to behaviors and patterns that reveal things about you. Hence, if your desire is to create a healthy life, you must learn to make healthy choices in your daily life.
What are Healthy Choices
Healthy choices are choices that you make to achieve a certain goal or objective. When you set a goal or target for yourself, you are recognizing that there are certain actions you must engage in to bring this goal to completion or to achieve this objective. Therefore, if your goal is to build a healthy and wellness-focused life, you must learn to make healthy choices that bring you closer to these goals and objectives.
How to Start Making Healthy Choices
To start making healthy choices, I like to encourage clients to identify clear targets and objectives. You must consider what your objective is and how you will achieve it. Setting goals that are too big will only leave you feeling rejected and frustrated. So, start by setting small, achievable, and measurable goals. This means that you will set goals that allow you to measure your progress towards the goal. Additionally, the goals are small enough for you to not feel overwhelmed by them. This keeps you motivated to keep making progress. And over time, motivation transitions into discipline. The more disciplined you are with a task, the less you will rely on your feelings, and the discipline will help you stay committed to your goal/objective.
Here's an example: Your goal is to decrease how much alcohol you consume during a week. You’d first start by identifying how much alcohol you currently consume. If you notice you consume 2 beers per night, this tells you that you’re consuming 14 bottles of beers every week. You may decide to start with a smaller, more manageable goal of dropping down to 1 beer per night, thus, decreasing your weekly consumption to 7 bottles of beers per week. You would also identify a time frame for how long you want to give yourself to stepdown to the 7 beers.
Hence, this goal is small, manageable, and measurable as you can see the decrease in your alcohol consumption. At the end of the given timeframe, say – 3 weeks, if you find that you are making less progress than you wanted, you can adjust the goal or seek additional support. If you find that you are progressing further, you can choose to keep the goal as is or increase the amount of days you can go without the beer to challenge yourself more.
Examples of Making Healthy Choices
Making healthy choices are about making active decisions about the things that impact your life. By actively making choices, you are demonstrating your ability to show up for yourself consistently. By making healthy choices, you are making choices that are in alignment with the goals and objectives you have for yourself.
Healthy choices may look differently for each of us because we all have different things that we have difficulties with. You may have difficulties with overeating, someone else may have difficulties with overspending, another may have difficulty setting boundaries in their relationships, and another person may have difficulty with overworking.
Learning to make healthy choices for yourself starts with having a frank and honest conversation with yourself about the habits and behaviors you possess. Healthy choices begin with identifying toxic and maladaptive behaviors that cause or increase dysfunction in your life. So, take stock and notice areas, relationships, behaviors, habits, and patterns that are fraught with dysfunction. Then identify a healthy objective that you can begin to work on in this particular area.
General examples of healthy choices may include:
· Starting, or maintaining, a healthy diet
· Investing in healthy practices such as meditation or journaling
· Building consistent exercise into your life
· Reducing/eliminating substance use – alcohol, vaping, prescriptions, street drugs
· Going for your regular medical appointments
· Reducing procrastination
· Setting healthy boundaries at work and at home
· Identifying and maintaining clear boundaries in personal/professional relationships
· Developing a healthy mindset
In Summary
Healthy choices allow us to take back control over our lives. Investing in healthy choices help us to make decisions that are in alignment with the goals and objectives we have for ourselves and our lives. By making healthy choices, we are choosing to invest in ourselves, invest in our health, and choosing to build a life that we can be proud of.
Be sure to connect with me here, if you need some support with learning how to make healthy choices. Schedule a free 15-minute consultation with me today.
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