Consistency is the Key to Health and Wellness

How many times have you caught a wind of inspiration to get your health in order, gone into overdrive to work out every day and eat only vegetables, just to experience burnout only a few days later, throwing all your new habits to the side in exhaustion?

I see so many people - friends, family members, youtubers, instagrammers - try to make huge changes to their health in a day, week, or month as if good health can be built in that short amount of time. Even when these people understand that habits take time to build and no matter how much they work out, changing their health will take time, people still create intense standards for themselves and burn out or get depressed when their body just can’t keep up. 

We’ve all been there. As well intentioned as we are, it’s incredibly difficult to overhaul your habits in a week and stick with the changes. I’m no doctor, but I know from experience that little changes that last are far superior to big changes that fade out in a month. 

It’s understandable that this quick-fix mentality is so prevalent. We all want to see changes, like, yesterday, but the reality is that habits are built over long periods of time, not in a short burst of inspiration. The key to health and wellness is consistency. 

In his book Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results, author James Clear writes, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” 

Another way to think of it: What are the things you do every day that contribute to your health and what are the things you do every day that detract from your good health? It’s way harder to try to meet an outlandish goal than it is to implement one new system into your daily routine that helps you become healthier. Once you master that system, move on to implementing a new one. 

What does using consistency to meet your goals look like? Look at fitness as an example.

Let’s say you’ve been wanting to improve your fitness for a long time. You want to be able to run a mile and feel good afterward instead of feeling knackered. You want to go to a yoga class and feel relaxed in all of the resting positions instead of shaking. Plus, you want to drink more water to stay hydrated, regulate your digestion, and clear your skin. 

If you were using the overhaul mentality, you’d start taking stabs at all three goals at once. You’d get up super early tomorrow to go to the gym for at least an hour, sign up for a bunch of yoga classes, and start chugging water. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, but implementing them all at once is going to exhaust you and being exhausted is going to take all the wind out of your motivational sails. Plus, you’re more likely to make impulse purchases that you think you “need” to get fit. 

On the other hand, if your focus is building a consistent habit, you have to think first about what habit is realistic for you to complete every day and go from there. If you’re not used to working out at all, a more realistic goal might be a twenty minute walk every night after dinner or 20 minutes of yoga every morning. To be consistent, you need to pick a starting point that you can actually see yourself doing every day without a problem. That will look different depending on the skills you already have in the area you’re trying to change. 

In Atomic Habits, James Clear recommends tying new habits to existing ones. So for instance, if you already have the habit of waking up in the morning and drinking a cup of coffee, schedule your new habit of doing yoga every morning right after your coffee. Build time into your schedule for it and think of it in terms of “yoga is the thing I do right after I have coffee” and your brain will start to frame it as a consistent habit. 

The point is to focus each day on doing one thing to make your health better until you’ve built consistency and made it a habit. Once you start doing positive things consistently, time is on your side, and you’ll only get healthier over time as you establish and build on these habits. 

This isn’t the sexy answer that we want to hear. We all want to get to our goals as fast as possible, but if you lose all momentum on the way to your goal because you over-stretched yourself, it’s going to take that much longer to get back on the proverbial horse and try again. To make matters worse, the system you’re using isn’t even sustainable when you try to overhaul a habit, so you’re likely to fail all over again. Why make it harder on yourself? Choose a more sustainable route and build on that instead.