Two Major Reasons for Failures During Healthful Lifestyle Change Attempts

Let me say from the outset that reasons for healthful lifestyle change failure are many and varied.  That is why my book explains how to select goals and provides 16 change implementation strategies. Two obstacles are the focus of this post: automaticity and self-control as a limited resource.

First, automaticity which is our tendency to behave on autopilot.  In fact, most of our thoughts, emotions, and actions occur to a complete or to a significant extent with no deliberation on our part.  As Nike might say, we "just do it.” The triggers for those automatic thoughts, emotions, and actions can be virtually anything occurring inside or outside our skin.

Imagine that you have set a healthful lifestyle goal that involves eliminating clutter in order to reduce the stress that it instigates.  Imagine further, that you are “totally” committed to making that change because you repeatedly have experienced intense aggravation coincident with being unable to find something you desperately, urgently need.  For a brief initial period, you make a successful effort to be organized and you reap the benefits.  But slowly or rapidly, the effort wanes and soon you are back to your old, disorganized, stressed-out self.

What happened?  As indicated above, it could have been stimulated by something within or something without.  You might have become preoccupied with your website development (inside the skin), or you might have gone on vacation and upon returning home discovered a mountain of new jobs that you hadn’t anticipated (outside the skin).  You reverted to your previous automatic practices because you ceased being sufficiently preoccupied with your hoped-for change.

Next, self-control as a limited resource, meaning that whenever we exert ourselves in one endeavor we are less likely to persevere in another that occurs closely in time.  We can use the same two examples presented above and consider them from the limited resource perspective.  In this case, the reason for our failure to maintain the clutter elimination effort would not necessarily be due to a failure of preoccupation with the hoped-for change, but because your energy has been sapped by something else.  For instance, you incorrectly assumed that you knew how expeditiously to make the web site development work (inside the skin) or your computer started acting-up such that every operation required much more execution time than usual (outside the skin).  In both cases, trying to develop your website exhausted your self-control muscle such that you had insufficient energy left to devote to being better organized.

           

Automaticity is countered by “forcing” yourself to prioritize the new healthful lifestyle change and to be preoccupied with it.  Self-control as a limited resource is combated by pacing yourself as best you can, and by employing other energy conservation techniques.  Obviously, there is much more to initiating and maintaining a healthful change which is why I wrote my book.