Healthy Habits: How to finally succeed with your New Year’s Resolution in 2020
We’re all guilty. Most of us do it every year. A new year, a new you. This is the year. You’ll exercise more. Stop smoking. Spend more time with family. Get that promotion you deserve. Clean the garage. Have that dream holiday. All the right Healthy Habits for Wellness and Longevity.
You’ll do… nothing. Well, at least statistically speaking, you’re 80% likely to fail at being the new you this year. Hey, there’s always next year?
Why New Year’s Resolutions don’t work
Despite the universal acceptance and cultural practice of New Year’s Resolutions, there are actually very simple and sound reasons they just don’t work.
Building new habits is harder than you think
What are habits? Well, the easiest way to define a habit is that a habit is something that you do regularly and consistently. If you do something now and then, on and off, it’s not a habit. Beyond that, there’s a whole field of behavioral psychology around triggers and cues for habit formation. Many books have been written about habits and the nudges used to create them. At the end of the day, it’s just hard. At a minimum, new habits take a few weeks to form. The world is too fast-paced for that these days. While you’re in the baby steps of forming your new habits for a better you, you get nudged 20 different ways by life and the connected world.
No measurement of habits means no management
As the saying goes, you can only manage what you measure. So if you want to implement new healthy habits, it would help to quantify that somehow. What’s your starting point? What’s your goal? What progress can you expect? The classic example, of course, measuring weight on the scale. Just doing the activity isn’t enough, and most can’t be bothered to keep notes.
No progression in habits guarantees relapse
So let’s imagine for a moment you did actually get there. You did the work, and you hit your goal. Now what? Science tells us that 95% of people on a diet go back to or even above their original weight within two years. Because healthy habits aren’t a project! It doesn’t count that you got there. You have to stay there. So there has to be some carrot that is always a little further out, to keep you going.
How to fix your habits
Now that we’ve established that you’re all but guaranteed to fail, we can talk about how one company is trying to help you succeed, for free. The team at Healthzilla has been developing technologies for consumers to manage their health and wellness by unlocking the power of their wearables data. We’ve just released a new version of their namesake app, now targeting the holy grail of health & wellness in how to get people to change their habits.
Quantified habits
It all starts with quantification. The global wearables revolution started with the Apple Watch, and the category of wearable devices is rapidly expanding to new formats like the Oura Ring and even smart clothes. This is a critical threshold, as it means we can now rely on objective data instead of intuition and subjective assessments. Rather than ask you about your activity and sleep, we simply measure it with these devices automatically in the background. That allows Healthzilla to simply tell you what your habits are, regardless of what you think your habits are. The data doesn’t lie!
The app tracks a wide variety of habits automatically, from physical activity and sleep to various forms of exercise, and even calorie deficit for those looking to lose a few pounds after Christmas. Trending habits like intermittent fasting and meditation are included, too. What’s best, none of the data has to leave your device, as the intelligent algorithms are capable of processing everything on your smartphone instead of uploading your sensitive data onto the cloud.
Gamification of commitment to new habits
Once you establish what habits you have, and how often you perform them, you can choose to participate in a 100-day transformation challenge. This is your data-driven New Year’s Resolution. If you take the challenge, the Healthzilla app will prompt you every week to add to your weekly routines to introduce and add to your habits. The app comes with scientific research briefs, tips & tricks, and built-in programs to help you get started with minimal friction.
As the app tracks your habit data in the background, you’ll get prompted along the way to keep you on track and in-check. The science and craft of habit building has been successfully used by social media and mobile gaming companies to hook us into unhealthy habits. This time, the team at Healthzilla is putting that same behavioral psychology to work for good, for you, for free.
If you’d like to finally make a permanent change towards a better you in 2020, then check out the free Healthzilla app on the Apple App Store.