For decades, health has existed in a black-and-white space. It’s been a series of rash and often unrealistic lifestyle changes, leaving one to believe the extreme lifestyle is the only one that will help you reach your goals.
It’s also why resolutions have become such a focus of the new year. They bring the hope that you can change. The more extreme those resolutions, the faster things will change. But change rarely comes.
You can blame yourself, or you can blame the resolutions. But I’d argue neither is wrong. The failure happens because of the process or lack thereof.
On the podcast, I teach you how to create a process you’ll love based on the habits lived out by the healthiest people on the planet. It begins by learning how to romanticize the process and not the destination, knowing if you stick with the process, the destination will come.
What You Can Learn From The Healthiest People
Arguably, one of the most significant detriments to achieving health is the wrong understanding of health. This isn’t necessarily at fault to you, but how culture has portrayed health in magazines, TV shows, and every movie you’ve ever watched. Health is portrayed as the repeated thought that it equals the size sewn in the waistband of your pants or the number on your scale.
Health has been promoted by how you look when the reality is that health is inside of you. What makes up your wholeness is what creates your outcomes.
Unfortunately, we’ve been able to hack this system, for good and for bad, making a mess of the true definition of health.
First and foremost, if you want health to last, you must change how you view it.
Health is not how you change your body. It’s how you support it. When you support your body, it will change. Even better, those changes will last.
That means being in shape is not a number on the scale. It’s about giving your mind, body, and soul the tools to feel its best. Health is the action you take. It’s what you create, not where or when you arrive.
Shifting the definition allows you to open up to the process of living health that changes the destination. Here are ten habits from the healthiest people to help you create health.
10 Habits of The Healthiest People
01. They find Enjoyment In It
You won’t do what you don’t love. Maybe temporarily you will, but not long term. Far too many people get sucked into the trap of following a plan, no matter how much they hate it, hoping to arrive at the intended destination. What they don’t understand is hate acts on your survival mechanism.
Hate signals a threat that triggers your body to respond to stress. In time, that leaves you returning to your old patterns, the ones you’re trying to break, like sleeping in instead of working out or downing cereal instead of a protein-rich breakfast.
No matter how much you want it, if you hate the process, you’ll always return to the old pattern that created the outcome you’ve been desperately trying to change.
Change only happens by learning how to enjoy the process. Change requires a perspective shift. If you understand how to change the story, you can love anything, even the things you once hated.
02. They think about “what” not “what not”
Scarcity acts on your survival response. I keep repeating it, but your survival mechanism dictates the outcome you experience. That’s because the most important facet of health is your safety.
Feeling safe opens the door to energy generation. On the other hand, feeling threatened forces your body to conserve energy, slowing your entire biology down.
What you focus on determines whether your survival mechanism is triggered, changing what your body does. Scarcity always triggers a threat.
If you want to change your body, stop focusing on what you can’t have and start focusing on what you can. Let go of restriction, deprivation, and starvation and think of abundance.
You get to move your body, sleep eight hours, and eat healthy. Let the positives squeeze out the negatives.
03. They are consistent
Consistency may be the most underrated health tips. It’s also one of the most essential success tips. In all areas of life, the most consistent reap the most significant rewards. Consistency is a key to success, and that’s why it’s one habit of the healthiest people.
It’s not about perfection but showing up consistently.
They consistently move their body, eat healthy, sleep well, engage in positive relationships, try new things and consistently show up in life.
The best part is that consistency leaves room for inconsistencies, like occasionally eating a piece of cake, sleeping in instead of working out, and staying up late.
Most of the time, they’re living routinely. But every now and then, they open up to experience something different. Consistency makes room for opportunity.
04. They Seek Balance
The healthiest people understand the goal of life is not perfecting. It’s creating balance. Balance means recognizing life as a movement.
Like all things, health is a flow, a movement, an action more than it’s stagnant. Things are always changing. The key is learning how to change with it.
Of course, understanding balance means recognizing many health ideas work against this concept. They push your body to extremes, pulling you out of balance. In the process, you fight your body, creating a body war you will never win.
Instead of fighting life, fight for balance. Understand what your body needs and provide more of that. Working to achieve the state of safety that is the state of health. Work your body, even push it, but balance that with rest and nourishment. Health is balance.
05. They prioritize self awareness
Of course, it’s difficult to understand balance without understanding yourself. There is a skill of self-awareness that helps you determine how balanced or out of balance you are.
The healthiest people are those who are most self-aware. Not in a means of self-enhancement but in self-betterment. To help make themselves better, knowing the better they are, the better they can help everyone else.
Health is a metric of how your body responds to what you do. Changing your health requires an awareness of how your body is currently responding. Health is the reaction of your biology, for good or for bad. That means you must pay attention to how your body responds so you can provide what it needs.
Pay attention to your body. Understand it and work to provide more of what it needs.
06. They focus on the present more than the future.
Getting caught up in 6-month goals or a 90-day program that promises you amazing results is easy. Time feels like a metric you can control or at least track. However, time is relative, making it a metric of your perspective rather than a matter of fact.
Regardless, future thinking neglects the only place change occurs, in the present. Go ahead and create a vision of where you want to go, but if you’re going to embrace the process of health you must let go of the timeline. This only puts unfair and often unrealitstic expectations that are rarely met. Leaving you circulating through the problems rather than learning to enjoy the process
Instead, focus on the present moment. The only decision that matters is the next one. Change happens today, and if you pay more attention to it, you’ll be amazed at what you’ll experience in 90 days. But that requires you to live more in the present and less in the future.
Want to know the rest of the habits of the healthiest people?
Tune into the podcast to find out.
A different way to set resolutions
It’s easy to get lost in the timelines and enticing destinations. The world has done nothing but romanticize these things, creating pressure to set resolutions that align accordingly. But, as you’ve learned through this mini-podcast series, you don’t have a problem. You have a pattern. The only way to change the problem is to influence the pattern.
Influencing the pattern means focusing on the action, not the outcome.
When you set resolutions, let them encompass how you want to show up, what your body needs to feel nourished, and how to heal your soul and healthify your mind.
What things can you do consistently that will help rewire the patterns you exist within?
I’m sharing my resolutions here.
I would love to know what resolutions you are setting. I know it’s not easy to let go of the goals, but it’s the only way to reach them. Let me know what resolutions and skills you’ll work on next year!
Ready to learn more?
Don’t forget to go back and listen to episodes one and two inside this mini-series devoted to changing the way you set resolutions (and view health). Get the full episodes here:
In the meantime, here are a few resources to get you started building better patterns and setting healthier resolutions:
- Upgrade Your Wellness Routine With This Tip
- 5 Ways To Guarantee Health Success
- 15 Healthy Habits To Take Into The New Year
- Why I Gave Up Finding Myself (Real Story)
- The Power of A Habit
