My habit goals for 2024

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. In this episode, I share my goals for 2024 when it comes to my own health habits. So enjoy the episode. All right. Welcome to episode 3, 2024, and tripling down on building my 8 foundational health habits. So at the time of recording this, we're in January 2024. And whenever a new year starts, it's always a good time to reflect and take stock of where you are and to think about where you want to focus your efforts for the year ahead. So I used the time towards the end of last year to think about where I was with the 8 foundational health habits I've been building for the last couple of years, and then also where I want to focus my efforts in 2024. And this initially started me thinking, look, I'm in a pretty good place with these 8 health habits now. I've managed to build to a decent level of consistency with them, whilst also increasing my targets incrementally over time too, for some of them. For example, when I first started out, I was tracking water at 2.5 liters per day, and I've since gone on to drink 3 liters of water a day. So feeling pretty good about things, I started to get excited thinking about what new things can I focus on this year. And as I was brainstorming that, a few ideas came to mind. So for a while, I've wanted to bring flossing my teeth in as a health habit. I have an idea for a few nutrition ones and also maybe one around mobility and stretching. These are all areas that I'm— I don't really have a lot of consistency in and they could be quite nice to bring into the mix. And as I was thinking about these new habits, something didn't feel quite right in the back of my mind. And that's because if I'm super honest with myself, there is some unfinished work with these existing 8 health habits. And whilst that's true, I shouldn't be thinking about anything else until all 8 of these are completely nailed and default behavior. I want them all to be easy, like super easy. And the reality is I'm not there yet. So why am I quite not there yet? Well, for a start, there are 2 habits in particular that I slip just below 80% consistency on fairly regularly. And then there's another couple of habits that whilst I'm pretty much there with them, there are some weak spots. I often end up hitting low 80% consistency on them and just scraping through. But behind the scenes, it's always touch and go as to whether I actually get to that low 80%. And then the other 4 habits, well, they're feeling pretty easy now, and I definitely feel like they're in the bank. So essentially, I have 4 habits that need some work and 4 that are completely nailed. And it just so happens that the 4 that need some work they are the most foundational and they are sleep, steps, water, and fasting. Now, if I take a step back, that doesn't feel like a place that I should be trying to build on top of. In fact, it feels like a place that needs more attention and more work to properly finish laying the foundations down. So when it comes to foundational health habits, 2024 isn't about anything new for me. Instead, I'm going to triple down on the 8 foundational habits I already have and completely nail them. And look, the reason that I'm hell-bent on this is I often talk about these 8 habits as the base of the pyramid for me, and this really feels like the easiest and the most elegant way to describe them. When they're in place, I've actually found it quite easy to operate at a very high level with my training and nutrition. In fact, a level that I never thought would be possible for me and a level that I thought was reserved for athletes. And before these habits were in place, I struggled to piece together any type of consistency with my training and nutrition, or in fact most other areas of my life. I was simply trying to do things on a very shaky foundation. And I want to give you a couple of examples where this was the case so you can kind of see what it feels like for me. So If I go back a couple of years, the first— so the first example is around my training. So if I go back a couple of years, I had no real rhythm or consistency to my training. Some weeks I would do 4 sessions and then other weeks I would only do a couple of sessions, and then perhaps I would even go a whole week without getting around to any at all, despite starting the week with really good intentions. And I can remember vividly I would plan my weeks with exactly what I wanted to do and it almost felt random whether they would end up getting done or not. And I would do this over and over and over again, week in, week out, for many years. And I just couldn't seem to get into the flow of things, and I just couldn't seem to keep it up. And it's not surprising that I didn't see many results at all. My physique and my strength stayed about the same during this period. If I fast forward to today, I'm consistently training 5 times per week. A mixture of weights and cardio, and I have a really solid rhythm going on now. I hit 10,000 steps per day as an average, and as a result, I'm now making decent progress on my strength and my fitness. And the key thing is that it all feels pretty easy to keep up now. The second example is around my nutrition. So again, if I go back only a year ago, there was a huge amount of yo-yoing going on, periods where I was super on and then I would be super off. So for example, I'd be all in on paleo one minute and by the way, not really enjoying it and then bingeing on bad foods the next minute. Of course, enjoying it at first, but then feeling disgusted with myself afterwards. And I would remember where I would literally go to bed feeling really uncomfortable and I would wake up with a stomachache from an overindulgent session on bad foods the day before. And as a result, I didn't feel good about myself. I had low energy. I often felt uncomfortable. I was overweight and I just wasn't set up for success when it came to my training. And if I think about today, I now count and stick to a set amount of calories. I eat about 180 grams of protein per day. I stick to a set of macronutrients, so protein, carbs and fat per day. I eat lots of whole foods and as a result I feel so much better. I've dropped 20 pounds and I've completely changed my body shape and physique. And the big difference between these before and afters with both my training and my nutrition is that before I didn't have these foundational habits down and now I mostly do. And having built that base of the pyramid, it just means that I have the right foundations in place, the right capability, the right energy, and the right discipline. And this means I can now tackle and be successful with the types of training programs and nutrition strategies that I hopelessly failed at before. So it's really clear to me that building these 8 foundational health habits has been transformative for me, both physically and mentally. And I therefore don't want to shortcut things and move on to new habits whilst there's still a little bit of final work to do in building the last couple of blocks of the base of the pyramid. And honestly, it doesn't matter how long it takes to do that. It just needs to get done before thinking about anything new, if I even tackle anything new. Maybe this is just enough forever. And like I said, the 4 habits that I'm a little bit stuck on, they're actually the most foundational. So I know that if I can crack them, there's likely a further transformation around the corner for me. So I'm going to wrap the episode with just giving a bit of a peek into how I'm thinking about working on these 4 habits I'm struggling with. And by the way, in future episodes, I'm going to go into more depth on each of the 8 habits, why they're important, and also how you can go about building them for yourself.. But for now, I'm going to stick to the 4 that need— or that I need to focus on. And I think I'll take them in order of difficulty, starting with the most difficult. So the first one is sleep. And sleep is definitely not only the most difficult for me, but it's easily the most important. And I only realized this after giving up alcohol. So one of the things that led me to giving up alcohol was, of course, the dreaded hangover. And as I got into my 40s, my hangovers were getting worse and longer. And that was despite me cutting down how much I drank. And about a month into giving up drinking, I remember one morning I woke up and I felt super crappy and hungover, and I just had a really bad day. I was tired, I felt anxious, I didn't feel like training, and I didn't stick to my diet. And I literally had to double-check myself. Like, did I have a drink yesterday? And then it clicked. A really poor night's sleep made me feel like I was hungover. And actually, it might have less been the alcohol and simply a poor night's sleep caused by the alcohol that was making me feel terrible when I was drinking. So I know sleep is super important for me, and it turns out that sleep is definitely the habit that needs the most amount of work. And if I look over my habit tracking like history, 6 of the last 7 months have been under 80%. And if I look at— where are we for sleep? So December last month, I hit 74%. So I nearly came in at 80%. And then in fact, November I did. I came in at exactly 80%. But then if I look at the 5 months prior to that, we're looking at 71%, 77%, 71%. 55% and 67%. So yeah, 6 out of the last 7 months have been under 80%. So again, not, not particularly great there. And my goal is 6.5 hours sleep per night. With all habits, I'm aiming for 80% consistency over the month, which basically means I can afford to miss about 6 times out of the month to get my 80%. And the other thing to know is I'm also talking about total time asleep, not just time in bed. Most of us usually lose about an hour getting to sleep and with various nighttime interruptions, etc. So therefore, to hit 6.5 hours sleep, I usually need to be in bed for about 7.5 hours. How do I track my sleep? Well, I track my sleep with Whoop. Whoop is a health wearable and it tracks the total amount of sleep. It tracks the amount of time you actually sleep and also gives you information about all of the different modes of sleep. REM sleep, etc., etc. And so yeah, I know pretty much exactly how much sleep I get every night. So it's quite easy to track. And then in terms of improving my sleep, look, there's no fancy gimmicks needed here. The big thing is really for me to be intentional about when I'm going to bed and when I'm waking up. And I know that sounds really simple and obvious, but most of the time that I miss 6.5 hours sleep, is when I know I need to rise early the next day and I just end up getting to bed late and I just don't give myself enough time to get that 6.5 hours in, which, as I said, usually means that I need to be in bed for 7.5 hours. So the big thing for me is that as evening gets underway, I need to think about what tomorrow looks like and then hit the sack accordingly. And if I can be disciplined with that, I should be able to get to 80% consistency for sleep going forward. And I'm really pleased actually to say that I've started 2024 with a bang. I'm actually well on track in January to comfortably hit over 80% consistency, and I should also hit a PR when it comes to my average hours of sleep for the month too. So off to a good start. That's sleep. So the second habit that I wanted to cover was steps, and this has been a pretty similar place to sleep actually. 6 of the last 7 months have been under 80%. So again, if I look at my tracking spreadsheet, steps, where are we? Steps. So 61% last month, 77% the month before. I then managed to scrape in at 81% the month before that. But then the 4 months before that, we're looking at 73, 65, 61, 73, etc. So again, like this, like from a consistency perspective, it's in about the same place as sleep. And with steps, my target is 10,000 steps per day. Now, the first thing to say is that I don't count steps as part of my zone— sorry, the first thing to say is I don't count steps I do as part of my zone 2 training or in fact any other type of training. So it has to be purely walking steps and that actually makes 10K steps quite tough. Because it's about 90 minutes of walking. Now, there's nothing terribly complicated about going for a walk, and there's also nothing terribly complicated about trying to fit in 90 minutes of walking each day. And what that means is the way to improve my steps is actually similar to sleep. I just need to be more intentional and I need to think and plan ahead for when I want to get them done. A good example is if I just jump into the day and leave it to think about later on in the day, it's really easy to reach mid-afternoon without getting many steps in at all. And by then it's all over. It's just really hard to recover and build to 10,000 steps as you get later into the day. And I almost always fail to reach 10K steps in that scenario. And then the other thing for me to think about is to make sure that I get a decent lump of the steps in as early as I can, because if I can get 3,000 to 4,000 steps done pretty early in the day, I then tend to find that between another walking session, a dog walk, and just general day-to-day life, I get to the 10K steps fairly easily. So with steps, it's be intentional, think and plan ahead, and when I'm able to, get them in early. All right. That's the first two habits covered, steps and sleep. And the next two are a little bit easier. So the third one is fasting. Now, my goal with fasting used to be the same as my other habits, 80% consistency for the month. However, since I've become more focused on building muscle, I now don't fast on weight training days, and this is because I usually train around lunchtime and I like to get a little bit of food in me before a weight training session. I weight train 3 days per week, so my goal is to be 80% consistent for the 18 or so days left in the month outside of that. And actually I've hit well over 80% consistency for fasting in the last 3 months. So I'm in a much stronger place compared to sleep and steps. But the reason that this habit is one of my 4 to improve is that I had a rocky period when I was adjusting from fasting all of the time to now a mixture of fasting and not fasting throughout the week. And that caused me to dip below 80% for 3 consecutive months. So even though I've done well in the last 3 months, I don't feel out of the woods yet. And if I think about how to improve my fasting, I don't really have a specific focus to improve my fasting other than I just need to keep an eye on it. I can only afford 3 misses when it comes to the total days being 18 or so, and that's a slightly thinner margin. So I just need to stay on top of it and that's, that's pretty much all I need to do., and now for the last habit, and that's water. So with water, my goal is to drink 3 liters of water per day. And no surprises here, I'm aiming at 80% consistency. And by the way, I will cover why I aim at 80% consistency in a future podcast, but it's too long to get into it now. So if you look at my track record with water, you would question why I'm even worried about this habit. I've had nearly 2 straight years of achieving over 80% consistency in drinking at first 2.5 liters of water, but probably in the last year or so, 3 liters of water. But if you go below the surface, there's another story. Even though I'm pretty much always make 3 liters of water a day, it's often a rush in the second half of the day. And consuming the bulk of your water towards the end of the day is always a bad idea because it involves a lot of peeing at night, which, by the way, doesn't help with the sleep goal. And it just kind of makes you feel uncomfortable in the evening. So even though I'm pretty great with my consistency, I just want to make it a little bit smoother how I get there. And the strategy to do that is pretty simple because I know what tends to work and I call it the third, third, third strategy. Yeah, I know it's a rubbish name for a strategy, but it works pretty well. I need to drink a third of my water intake in the first 30 minutes of waking. It's not the most comfortable thing to do. I mean, who really likes drinking cold water upon waking? But getting that early win in the bank sets into my awareness straight away, and it also gets me an early win and some momentum. And then I need to drink a third of my total water intake throughout the morning. So basically before midday, and that's usually pretty easy given I've just done that in 30 minutes. So it's a super low bar. And then that leaves me the rest of the afternoon to go through the last third. Again, usually pretty easy given I have momentum and I can now see the finish line. So that's my focus for my water habit. Follow that stretch, follow that strategy, and just try and reach the goal a little bit more smoothly. And there you have it. 2024 is about really dialing, dialing in the 4 habits that need a bit of extra work: sleep, steps, fasting, and water. I will cover my progress with these 4 habits in the future episodes. And I will also share strategies and tips that can help you build foundational health habits for yourself. But for the time being, have a healthy 2024, and I will see you in the next episode.