We’ve made our way into this new year a little bit… and maybe you’re already noticing that the changes you wanted to make for the new year are already falling to the wayside.

Change can be hard. Humans are creatures of habit, for better or worse, and to make a lasting change can be a challenge. But it is possible.

In The Slight Edge, Jeff Olson talks about how it is easy to do the positive or healthy thing in any given moment, and it is also easy not to do it. That one decision in one moment is never really earth shattering. But he tells us that those little decisions compound or add up over time.

In thinking about this, what I am attempting to do in my life right now is make the easy healthy choice even easier. Or even this- what if it’s actually hard *not to do it? What if I make it harder to make the unhealthy choice? Or even impossible?

In Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about this as a way to change our habits. I love James Clear’s book. I’ve read it a couple times and he breaks habit change down in such an easy, manageable way.

Here are some things I’ve put into place to take the decision-making out of my behaviors. For example, to help save for retirement, I have an automatic deduction taken out from my paycheck every month. This way, I don’t see the money, it never reaches my hands to spend. It goes into a retirement account every month.

I have been trying to make healthy eating more automatic as well. One example of this is a simple bowl of fruit:

I put a bowl of fruit on the small island we have in our kitchen. In it, I put bananas, apples, and oranges. This one small action has meant that every day, the first thing I reach for in the morning to eat is a piece of fruit. Don’t get me wrong, I eat other things too (including Ye Olde College Diner’s sticky buns that I had yesterday that were so worth it), but my go-to is a piece of fruit. Usually I’ll grab another piece of fruit, once or even twice, later on in the day. I’ll make a bunch of hard-boiled eggs on Sunday that I keep in the fridge for the week. That way I have a simple, healthy protein choice that is easy to grab from the fridge.

Over the holidays, I had a bowl of fruit on the island, but I also had a couple containers of cookies on the counter. Do you know how many cookies I ate over Christmas? I can’t tell you. It’s embarrassing.

But now that the holidays are over, all that’s left is the fruit. And I’ve been eating a lot of it! It’s almost like… this method works or something. 😛

So in expanding this, what other areas of life can I make the good choice easier, and the bad choice impossible?

I think about exercise- one easy, low-key exercise hack is to park further away. If you add an extra 200 steps here and there, that adds up over time. So that is another easy way to compound a healthy habit over time.

There are other things I’d like to do this year like writing goals, reading goals, and running goals. So I’m thinking of how to make those things more automatic as well.

Do you have any ideas on implementing healthy habits this year? I’d love to hear from you.