How to change habits the healthy way.

Have you ever heard that it takes 21 days to commit to a new healthy habit? Well, this is actually a myth. ‍In fact, it takes an average of 66 days. Depending on certain lifestyle and personal factors, this can actually take between 18-254 days. Exercise habits can even take 150% longer than eating habits.

Seems too long? With a little knowledge, your healthy lifestyle achievements can be a bit easier to adopt. It all starts with your brain.

The Fast Brain

This is where the majority of us act. It’s the instinctive survival side of your brain, or the primitive or caveman brain — “me hungry, eat chocolate.” Very early in life, say when you were a toddler or child, your fast brain had to develop in order to fit in with your environment and survive. Modes associated with the fast brain might include:

Autopiloting: Wake up, get kids up and ready, breakfast, work, and school, pick up kids, home, dinner, showers, bed and repeat. Many of us can relate to this.
Directing: It’s typically involved and keeps us efficient for our daily responsibilities and obligations.
Mindless or unconsciousness: Typically, the fast brain isn’t connected to behavior that requires a lot of thought.
Shortcuts: There is a lack of connection of behavior to values or basic human needs so the fast brain may encourage shortcuts to the outcome.

Think of the fast brain as a big factory machine that just gets the input, does what it’s designed or told to do efficiently and as quickly as possible, and like magic, produces the expected outcome.

The Slow Brain

This is where we rarely find ourselves operating from. The slow brain is the wrench that you might throw into the fast brain machine in order to shake things up or cause a shift in the process. This part of the brain is less evolved as it’s used only about 5% of the time. Modes associated with the slow brain include:

Willpower, decision making, problem solving and planning ahead.
Most connected to our desires, motivators, values, and other key ingredients needed for positive behavior change.

When the slow brain is actively working for you in a healthy manner, it is intentional, reflective, in-tune and conscious.

As a result, in order to throw a wrench into your own fast brain mode, you need to know WHY you want your desired future outcomes. This connects to the brain’s “reward center” and “inaccurate thoughts” that play a role in making habit change successful long term.

Care you will love.

First Stop Health providers are here to care for you! You can schedule a visit with our primary care providers, certified diabetes educators and registered dietitians to talk about your health concerns. All our visits are virtual, so you can get care from where you're most comfortable!