Among many well-meaning health blogs, one common healthy living concept rears its head time and time again – that making healthy adjustments to your lifestyle is going to take a long time, will feel like climbing a huge mountain, perhaps Everest, and lead to personal betterment.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with framing the idea of improvement as a climb, it’s quite apt in fact, but doing so can cause beginners to feel very intimidated. Should you really be thinking about one of the most challenging athletic achievements you could ever take part in when you’re trying to make a difference?
While this can feel inspiring to begin, it’s easy to see yourself struggling to accomplish your goals when they feel so titanic. Let’s consider a healthier method of finding your path forward, and ensuring those mental and physical steps rejuvenate you for good:
Focusing On Incremental Steps
When you take a Mount Everest view of your health journey, it’s easy to miss the progress you make in comparison to the end goal. So in other words, you don’t look at each footstep, which is a major achievement, you just look at the final goal or not. For example, instead of solely focusing on the time it takes to quit smoking, you can celebrate smoke-free days one after the next, allowing yourself to see the wall of progress you’ve built brick-by-brick. That in itself can be so much more inspiring, and it shows that all you need to do is make it through the next day.
Promoting A One-Size-Fits-All Approach
No health journey is going to be perfect for everyone. Perhaps you simply hate running with every fibre of your being, but you absolutely adore swimming and can’t get enough of it. If you were limited to the former, are you likely to keep that process up? If you practice the latter (even if it takes you some time to realize your passion), will you ever care about the overarching progress as long as you can have fun each day? You likely know which one is more sustainable in the long term, so don’t be afraid to pursue that, even if it differs from what everyone else is doing.
Neglects Mental & Emotional Wellbeing
We tend to think of a health journey as being solely physical, but that’s not always true. Your mental health and optimism is just as important as the wellbeing of your body. In fact, both feed into one another. For this reason, focusing on your sense of wellbeing and forward focus, be that through cognitive aids like great sleep, or simply knowing how to deal with stress, is just as healthy as going to the gym. So, perhaps the most fitness-aiding practice you’ll keep up with this year is keeping a meditation schedule, or walking more in nature. Sure, it might not have the same glory as a mega mountain-climbing achievement, but it still absolutely counts.
With this advice, we hope you can feel more nourished by a grounded view of healthy living. The mountain can wait for another day.