&
MIND
WELLBEING
How To Make A Healthy Habit Stick
Y
ou may have heard people say it takes
21 days to form (or break) a new habit,
but a definitive study by Phillippa Lally
at University College London found it actually
takes months for a new habit to stick. That’s a
long time to maintain willpower.
But what if you could minimise the amount of
willpower required to establish a new habit or
to break a bad one? This is where temptation
bundling comes in.
Katherine Milkman, a professor at The Wharton
School and expert in changing behavior, coined
the phrase through her research. She describes
temptation bundling as “coupling instantly
gratifying ‘want’ activities with engagement in
a ‘should’ behaviour … ” Basically this means
taking something you enjoy doing and pairing
it with a less-enjoyable new habit that you’re
trying to form. For example:
Goal: To take off your make-up every night.
Maybe you always, always, always manage to
watch your favourite show before bed, but you
regularly skip washing your face. Bundle those
two! Decide right now that you won’t plop down
on the couch until after your face is clean. Or,
if you’re more of a before-bed Instagram scroller,
commit to only doing it after removing your
make-up and applying a couple of night-focused
skin care products.
Goal: To skip dessert. It’s easy to eat dessert; it’s
hard to eat an overall clean diet. So, make one
dependent on the other. Only allow yourself
dessert on days during which you’ve consumed
meals and snacks comprised of whole, unpro-
cessed foods, abundant veggies and lean proteins,
no junk, and lots of water. Your dessert days
will drop and your overall diet (which, to be
honest, is usually a bigger problem than dessert
itself) will improve. And that can only mean
great things for your skin.
Goal: To hit the gym every day. Bundle the gym
— or a jog or walk — with an audiobook or
podcast you love. Only allow yourself to listen
to those while you’re working out. Bundling
Hunger Games with her gym trips is actually
what sparked Professor Milkman’s research in
the first place. She couldn’t wait to find out what
happened next in the book, so she found herself
at the gym five days a week!
Good intentions can only take us so far. Many
of us embark on establishing a new habit, only
to find we fail about three days in, but the more
you can stick to a more health-focused routine,
the better your skin will be. After a while, your
skin will start to show improvements and if that
isn’t a big enough reason to stick at it, we don’t
know what is!
ISSUE #12 | 2019 | SkinHealthMagazine.com 28