Get sticky fingers for healthy habits - 5 foolproof tips

Making healthy habits last the distance is one of the hardest parts of creating a healthy lifestyle, but they’re essential to our long term success.

Need a helping hand? We’ve got your back, boo! Steal our 5 best tips to make your healthy habits stick:

1. Don’t just set goals, set intentions. Stay present and motivated by consciously creating awareness around why you are seeking to make a healthy change. What does that even mean, you ask? Well, instead of telling yourself you need to lose weight (which might motivate you for a minute), re-frame that thought. The intention is to feel your best in mind and body. Remembering the intention will get you through each day, and one step closer to achieving your goal. Intentions are also a great way to feed that need for instant gratification and keep you on track in a sustainable way.
2. Accountability is key. When you’re accountable to someone else, a friend, a therapist, a family member, or even your fitness tracker, who will also act as your cheerleader, you’re more likely to reach your long term goal. The power of social expectations can be that extra push needed to see yourself stay the course and reach the finish line!
3. Be consistently flexible. What now, you say? In order to make an action a habit, we need routine and consistency. But let’s get real, life often gets in the way! Long term success means you learn to stay the course, or jump back on the healthy habit wagon, even in the midst of holidays, dinners out or after a big Friday night. Just as repetition is necessary to form a new habit, so is resilience for long term success. Don’t quit if you slip, just dust yourself off and try again. Festive cheer without food FOMO is handy when the calendar fills up.
4. Set SMART goals. Starting with small and specific goals sets you up for success. In order to make a habit sustainable, and dare we say enjoyable, start with what’s achievable and work your way up. SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Getting clear on the what and the how, and setting yourself up for incremental successes, will build confidence and joy while you build muscle, lose fat, walk farther, you get the picture. And smaller, smarter changes will all add up to bigger, meaningful outcomes.
5. Two-for-one habits. Try attaching a new action onto an existing habit as a strategy to help make it stick. Since habits need stable context cues to become cemented in your routine, this might just do the trick. Start taking your Multi 2.0 with your morning cup of tea, easy peasy! Here is why that one habit matters so much.

Looking for more small changes that add up? 100 ways to make your life a little bit better and our 7 day gratitude challenge are both good places to start.