5 rules to build rock solid health habits (not what you would expect!)

Hey, welcome to the Daniel Clough Podcast. I'm Daniel Clough, and on this podcast I cover the power of building foundational health habits in your life. I also share strategies that can help you build your own foundational health habits so that you can become the best version of yourself. Today's episode is an action-packed one. I'm going to cover 5 rules that will help you build foundational health habits. These rules took me a long time to figure out, and I'm super pumped to share them with you. Enjoy the episode. Hey, in this episode I will bring together 5 rules that are critical for building rock-solid foundational health habits. I've had to learn these the hard way, and they've been the difference between me struggling to build foundational health habits for most of my adult life to now having over a handful that I can easily be consistent with. But before we jump in, I want to give you a quick warning. Most of these rules are going to be different to what you might instinctively want to do, or perhaps advice that you've heard from other experts. But that's actually good news because it presents an opportunity for you to think about things in a different way and to have a breakthrough, and most importantly, to start getting the results that you want. So with all of that said, let's jump straight into the first rule. So the first rule is focus on one habit at a time. Building a new habit is hard, and it becomes exponentially harder when trying to do several at the same time. I would argue that it's mostly impossible. And trust me, I've tried hundreds of times before and I haven't managed it yet. I bet you have too. When you're trying to build a new habit, you're essentially trying to do something that's completely new, or you're trying to change an existing behavior that's pretty deeply ingrained. So it needs your full attention and focus if you're going to be successful with it. When I first started my habit journey, there are times, actually most of the time, where I would try to focus on 2 or 3 habits at the same time. And all I found is that I would do a bit better at some and then a bit worse at others, and I didn't manage to build any habits with that approach. And it took me a while to realize that it's better to let some habits tread water or even languish so you can focus all of your efforts on getting one habit completely down. And the good news is that once a habit is established, it takes a fraction of the effort to maintain it. So once it's built, you can then easily keep it up whilst you turn your attention to the next habit that you want to build. For example, today it's easy for me to maintain 6 foundational health habits. These were initially very hard to build, but now they are built, I can spend most of my time focusing on building my next new habit. This is a great place to be, and it's a place you'll likely never get to if you try to work on more than one habit at a time. In fact, I nearly made this mistake recently. Right now, my focus is on my whole foods foundational health habit. It's a new habit, so I'm in the early stages of finding it hard and kind of working out the strategies to improve my consistency. At the same time, I really want to improve working on my mobility at the moment, and this is going to mean making it a daily habit. It's so tempting to try and work on both whole foods and mobility at the same time. In fact, I nearly convinced myself that because there's virtually no overlap between whole foods and mobility, I would be capable of working on both at the same time. But I managed to catch myself in the moment, and I reminded myself that eating whole foods is a much higher priority, and until I get that under control, I can't allow myself to focus on anything else. It needs all of my focus. Another thing that's worth mentioning: that doesn't mean that you can't do other stuff outside of the habit that you're focusing on. For example, I will still be doing mobility, but importantly, I don't have any fixed expectations for it, and it isn't a main focus for me. And what you'll usually find is that the things you're not focusing on, they will marginally improve anyway. Case in point, I actually had my best week for mobility last week. So that's the first rule: focus on one habit at a time. All right, rule number 2: start small and then scale in difficulty over time. When you start trying to build a new habit, every bone in your body is going to want to jump straight to the gold standard. "Right, I've had enough of never going to the gym. Starting next week, I'm going every day." Or, "I'm so sick of eating desserts in the evening. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to give up sugar entirely." Sound familiar? Well, look, there's a fatal flaw with this approach. It's simply too much, too soon. The difficulty curve is far too high, and the chances of being able to learn and maintain consistency like this is virtually zero. You'll likely last a few days, a few weeks at absolute best. And that's because optimal learning occurs just outside of one's comfort zone. In fact, there's a clever psychologist called Lev Vygotsky who called this a zone of proximal development. And he built a model called the learning zone model, which has 3 layers to it: the comfort zone, the learning zone, and the panic zone. And his theory is that in order to learn successfully, We need to be challenged, but it's a fine line. You want to push yourself out of your first zone, the comfort zone, and you want to get into the second zone, the learning zone. In the learning zone, you're definitely going to feel some pressure, but it's a healthy place to learn and be successful. And importantly, because you are learning and being successful, it feels motivating to be in the learning zone. When you make things too difficult, you move out of the learning zone and you fall into the third zone. That's called the panic zone. And this is a bad place to be. It feels horrible and it's hard to learn and be successful here. So you want to be in the learning zone. This is this sweet spot where you feel challenged and you're able to learn. And it's probably good. I'll share a practical example with you so you can kind of see how that plays out in my own life. For each of the 6 foundational health habits that I've built, I've had to learn a number of things along the journey, and each one is critical to the knowledge I now have that allows me to be consistent with that habit. Protein is a good example. My goal is 150 grams of protein per day, and this is now easy for me, and my average is almost always upwards of 180 grams. In fact, that's a good reminder for me to now change my target to 170 grams of protein, which is a gram per pound of body weight, which is really my gold standard for that habit. Now, if I had tried to go for 150 or 175 grams immediately, it would have been mind-boggling to conceive how to eat that much protein per day. So instead, I initially focused on 100 grams. And at first this was hard, but I was able to spot some fundamental strategies for how to achieve it. And soon enough, I was eating comfortably over 100 grams of protein every day. I then increased my target to 150 grams, which stretched me and put me in the learning zone once again. Now things just went from easy to hard, but not too hard. I was able to see ways for me to build my way from eating just over 100 grams of protein to now 150 grams of protein. And since then, I've been able to optimize things even further to now comfortably being able to eat, on average, 180 grams of protein a day. And if you look back on that journey, you'll notice that there were 3 key learning phases: the foundational strategies that allowed me to get to my first goal of 100 grams, then new learnings that helped me reach 150 grams,— and then further optimisations that helped me get to the 180 grams level. And none of these would have taken place if I'd have just tried to jump immediately to 180 grams. It would have been so far out of my comfort zone that I would have just burned out and failed hard. So in summary, here's what we have so far: Focus on one habit at a time. Start small and then scale in difficulty over time. Okay, Rule Number 3: Be patient. If you Google, how long does it take to build a habit, you're going to get a range of answers. 21 days, 30 days, 45 days, even 66 days. I'll tell you right now, these are all completely wrong. Now obviously the right answer is, it depends. Depends on the person, the habit, the environment, also how ambitious the habit is. But I'll say this, understand that it's going to take longer than you want. So you need to be patient. As we've already talked about, most habits are about trying to do something completely new or trying to change an existing behaviour that's deeply ingrained. And in a lot of cases, the habit goes against our personality. If it didn't, we'd be naturally doing it anyway. If you're going to work through the incremental stages of building a habit up like we just talked about, it could easily take 4 to 6 months to firmly establish a habit at the level that you ideally want. And sure, it might happen quicker than that, and you'll certainly get incremental wins along the way, but you can't be in a rush. We're talking about building foundational health habits that will be with you for a lifetime. They're going to give you results for many decades to come. So 4 to 6 months in the grand scheme of things is nothing. In fact, it's an incredible return on investment of your time. Rushing will only cause you to shortcut things. In the worst-case scenario, it will lead to failing and frustration. And giving up entirely. And this is how most New Year's resolutions go. In the best case scenario, you'll simply have to start again and things will ultimately just take even longer. Now, being patient is something that I'm having to live by at the moment, and that's because I'm in my second month of working on a new habit: eating 80% whole foods. Last month I hit 45% consistency, and this month I'm going to come in at about 50%. So I'm right in those early stages of seeing where my baseline is and starting to figure out some of the foundational strategies needed to take the jump to 60% and 70% consistency. And I know this habit in particular is going to be perhaps my toughest and my longest yet. And that's because I historically have a bad relationship with food. So I'm starting to get my head around the fact that this one might even take the rest of 2024 for me to be able to reach 80% consistency with it. But I'm ready for the journey, because if I can nail this habit, just imagine the health benefits it's going to bring me in my 40s, 50s, and for the rest of my life. So that's Rule Number 3: Be patient. Let's get into Rule Number 4: Track daily using a physical tick sheet. I've covered the power of tracking habits with a physical tick sheet in previous episodes, so I won't labor the point too much here. Just know though, using a physical tick sheet to track your consistency is so powerful that will often be the difference between success or failure. And that's because it acts as a visual cue, keeping the habit in plain sight many times throughout the day. Ultimately, what this does is it raises your self-awareness of the habit, and this helps remind you throughout the day to take action. It also helps you adjust your behavior as you notice strong or weak periods of consistency, and also what's working and not working. And lastly, it's just very motivating to be able to see your progress over a slightly longer period of time. Here's a good example of how using my physical tick sheet is helping me stay on track with my habits this month. When I miss a habit on any given month— sorry, when I miss a habit on any given day this month, it quickly becomes really obvious to me. And that's because I now have to look at a big fat cross right in front of me several times a day. And whenever this happens, I feel compelled to double down the following day so as I don't clock up 2 consecutive misses. And as a result, with the exception of Whole Foods, I haven't missed any of my habits 2 days in a row so far this month. And as with everything I talk about, I walk the talk. I have 27 physical habit sheets that represent the last 27 months of my habit tracking. Okay, we're nearly there. Last rule, number 5: find a mentor or someone on the same journey. Finding someone who is either trying to do something similar and/or someone who has already been successful with what you're trying to do can make everything just much, much easier. It creates a structure of accountability, and this will massively increase your chances of success, as no one wants to let somebody else down. You're going to find yourself working hard to avoid that happening. You might also find it fun and challenging being in competition with an accountability partner, and this can help stretch you further than you might ordinarily do on your own. It's also going to help you learn at an accelerated pace because when you go through the journey with a peer or peers, you'll be able to exchange learnings along the way. And if you're working with a mentor, you'll be able to get advice from someone who's already been where you are, often just at the right time. And over the last couple of years, I've become very close to a good friend of mine called Rich. We're both on a similar journey to becoming healthier, better versions of ourselves. And what's so great about this is our goals and plans overlap quite a lot. And I can say without doubt that I am further along in my own journey through being able to share ideas, have some friendly competition, and through the structure of accountability that I get having that relationship with Rich. So if you can find an accountability partner or someone who can be a mentor for you, it's well worth it. It can speed the whole journey up. So there you have it, 5 rules for building rock-solid foundational health habits. Let's do a bit of a recap. Rule number 1: Focus on one habit at a time. Rule number 2: Start small and then scale in difficulty over time. Rule number 3 is be patient. Rule number 4: Track daily using a physical tick sheet. And then lastly, rule number 5: Find a mentor or someone on the same journey. If you're missing any of these, you're you're going to find it very hard to build foundational health habits in your life. You might even struggle to ever build any. But if you have these 5 rules in place, you're going to do very well. All right, one last piece of advice. I said at the beginning, most of these rules are going to be different to what you might instinctively want to do, or perhaps advice that you've heard from other experts. And you've got to fight against this and be willing to go against your natural instincts. You will want to focus on more than one habit at a time. I can guarantee it. You will want to start with the gold standard of the habit that you want to build. You will be impatient and you will think that the habit will be much easier and quicker to build than it will actually take. You will be tempted to skip tracking your habits daily on a physical sheet because it's a bit of hassle. And you will be tempted to skip finding a peer or a mentor to help you. You'll probably just think that you can do this on your own and that you don't need it. I'm going to say all of those things would be wrong. Write these rules down and follow them, and I guarantee it will change everything for you. And I'll finish with a suggestion for a practical next step just to get you going. Pick one habit that you want to establish and write it down. Be really clear about what it is that you want to achieve. Make it small enough that it will require you to get out of your comfort zone, but not too much. You want to be in that learning zone where things are a little bit hard but not too hard. And then create a physical tick sheet for the month that you can mark each day with either a tick or a cross, and then put it somewhere very visible where you'll see it multiple times in the day. And you can find an example template of mine in the show notes. And then simply go for it. It might take a month, it might take 2 months, it might take 3 or 4 months, but soon enough you're going to see that you will build a habit that you're really proud of, and then you can go on to build more and more and more. Feel free to drop me an email with how you're doing. I'm here to help if you need it.