How to Build New Routines

Leaner Creamer serves as a great tool in aiding in building and maintaining healthier habits. In the spirit of encouraging healthy new routines (exercising more, eating healthier, etc.) we wanted to list some tips that help in incorporating new behaviors into our lives.

• Start small

Make your early goals achievable. As you progress you’ll want to amp things up, but oftentimes people have trouble getting started with new healthy routines by doing too much too quickly. Change happens, but it happens gradually.

• If applicable, have a Cheat Day

This can be a slippery slope at times, but it does help to have a day where you can relax and “cheat” a little bit. It might be a day where you rest instead of exercise or have tacos and margaritas (Taco Tuesday for the win) instead of salad. Being too rigorous with trying to maintain new habits is often unrealistic and can often lead to backsliding and cheat days usually help. The trick is just making sure that your Cheat Day is a day and doesn’t turn into a Cheat Week.

• Use the Premack Principle

The Premack Principle is a concept from behavioral psychology. Basically, learning a new behavior is much easier if you make doing an existing behavior contingent on doing the new one first. For example, if you want to drink more water and less coffee, you can give yourself the rule that for every cup of coffee you enjoy, you must first drink two glasses of water. This can also mean doing 10-20 minutes of exercise for every hour you spend playing video games. This can also lead to more advanced ideas like token economies, but to start just remember that pairing old behaviors with new ones is a great way to give yourself new habits.

• Tell people… or not

Should you tell people that you’re trying to learn healthier habits? The jury is still out on this one. One school of thought is that telling people means you will have to put your money where your mouth is and motivate you by not wanting to lose face after publicly committing to the new course of action. On the other hand, you might not be motivated by the perception of others, or the added pressure might add to your stress and make you more likely to lapse. It’s hard to say, and while there are broad tips for what works for people, many of these things also tend to be subjective. Just like how you might be a person who does better without a Cheat Day, maybe you’re also a person who gets into healthier routines more effectively by not making a big thing of it.

• Keep a log

The first step to achieving goals is often setting them in the first place… crazy right? This creates a measured way to set what you want to do and to what intensity. Recording how well you do at the goals and what you complete at different times is also beneficial, because as you progress and look back at what you had done before, you will see the ways in which you have improved, just by what you are currently capable of versus what you started doing… this cant help, but give you a sense of pride and encouragement.

• Increase goals as you progress

This one is fairly straight forward. As you progress, you’ll want to push yourself further as your capacity increases. Enough said.

• Don’t get discouraged

A big thing you’ll need to remember is that no matter how well you do, drawbacks are bound to happen and you won’t do things perfectly. This is fine. So much of moving forward in life, and this can apply not just to incorporating healthy habits like exercise routines and healthy eating, but also taking up new hobbies or advancing in your career, is not getting discouraged and not stopping. Staying the course and not giving up is always the key to success. This also goes for mistakes we make; if you skip exercising one day, rather than dwelling on the mistake it is best to just resume the new routine the next day. And in general a big secret of this is not being too hard on yourself when you falter. Sure, you need to be disciplined and you need to care about meeting goals, but it doesn’t serve to be too hard on yourself. Remember: feelings of excessive guilt or shame will often hold you back from moving forward.