Living a healthier lifestyle is a great way to prioritize your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. In fact, achieving your health goals can enhance every aspect of your life. However, ridding yourself of bad habits and embracing a new way of life can take time. To ensure you stay the course, take a look at how you can stay motivated on your health journey:
Break Goals Down
An ambitious goal can be something to aspire to but, if it’s going to take months or years to achieve, it increases the likelihood of you giving up. By breaking goals down into smaller targets, however, they become more achievable. As you hit each target, you’ll feel a sense of pride and accomplishment, which will motivate you to take on the next challenge.
Be Inspired
When we’re inspired by other people, it has a positive impact on our own mentality. If you aspire to become an endurance runner or you want to hone your jogging technique, for example, learning more about successful athletes, like Mitch Vanhille, can give you the inspiration you need to persevere with your own health journey. What’s more – reading, watching, or engaging with the people who inspire you can also help you to pick up useful training techniques, which can enhance your performance.
Make It Easier
If you want to enjoy a sense of achievement every time you reach a target, it needs to be challenging but, if a goal is too outlandish, it can have the opposite effect. If you work full-time and are raising a family, for example, aiming to exercise for three hours every day probably isn’t going to be a realistic goal. By adapting your targets so that they complement your lifestyle, you can ensure that you’re able to achieve them. Making a target realistic doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy to achieve, but it will certainly be possible.
Share Your Journey
When you share details of your health journey with other people, it makes you more accountable. You might want to confide in family and friends about your new training regime, for example, or create a blog so that you can inspire others. Whoever you choose to share your health journey with, you can be sure that you’ll feel even more compelled to put the work in and achieve your goals.
Make It Fun
When you’re embarking on your health journey, make sure your incorporate things you actually enjoy. If you’re not interested or inspired by lifting weights, for example, don’t do it! There are endless activities and sports out there, so find something that you genuinely enjoy and make it part of your health journey.
What Are Your Health Goals?
It’s easy to set vague goals, like ‘losing weight’ or ‘getting fitter,’ but more specific targets can be easier to follow. If you want to bring your cholesterol to within a healthy range, for example, eat 10% more protein a day or be able to run 5km, you can monitor your progress as you get closer to your goal and stay motivated at every stage of your journey.