Guest Podcast: The 5 Habit Myths Around Health – With Dr. Mindy Peltz

Dr. Mindy Pelz is a renowned holistic health expert and one of the leading voices in educating women about their bodies. She is on a mission to start a women’s health revolution!

Teaching her signature “5-Step Approach,” Dr. Mindy has empowered hundreds of thousands of people around the world to harness their body’s own healing abilities through fasting, diet variation, detoxing chemicals from the body, stress management, and lifestyle changes – as keys to achieving optimum health and slowing down the aging process.

I had a blast sitting down with Mindy to discuss all things kick-starting your habits to make healthy choices. 

In this podcast, The 5 Habit Myths Around Health, we cover:

• To build good habits, you can’t rely on willpower 
• How to change your habits for better health without depending on motivation
• Why motivation isn’t enough to truly grow and improve your habits 
• Using the power of positive emotions and dopamine to create changes 
• The reason small goals are the secret to big success 
• Simple ways to find joy in creating healthy habits

The Reason You Can’t Rely On Willpower To Make Habit Changes
We so often think we need to white-knuckle our way to success. The more that we add, the more likely we are to take away: it’s the concept in psychology known as goal dilution. Willpower is like a muscle. If you went to the gym every single day for the next week and just trained your right bicep, you wouldn’t be able to pick up a cup of tea by the time you get to the end of the week. While on the other hand, if you go once a week for seven weeks, you will get stronger. If we try and do too much at once, then it’s not going to work; don’t bite off more than you can chew. Willpower will fail. Instead, you need to focus on “skillpower.” 

Think Less: Your Habits Become Easier To Manage
All humans will lose motivation; all humans cannot sustain the same level of motivation. We should make changes that will support our willpower rather than defeat it. Don’t give yourself twenty goals to follow at once. Instead, focus on one key thing. Then, the rest of the changes you’re looking at will be environmental. One way to do this is by prescheduling your workouts, so you know when and where they are happening. Batch cook your meals, so you don’t have to think about your meal for the next day. Layout your yoga mat at night so it’s the first thing you see in the morning. 

Motivation Isn’t Enough To Build Better Habits
You want to be your future self’s best friend. We all think about our future self being perfect and never giving into temptation. Instead, we should think about our most exhausted selves. Well, you live in the real world; you’re going to be tired, and you’re going to be in a bad mood at some point. You need to set up your habits in a way where they can weather the storm.  If you do the same thing, in the same circumstance, enough times, it becomes a habit. However, if you can only repeat your habit when the circumstances are perfect, then you’re not going to allow it to become a true habit. Habits will take over for motivation when you can repeat it for all circumstances; then you don’t have to be motivated anymore. 

Create Positive Feelings When You Are Starting A New Habit
Repetition is one of the most beneficial things, but it’s got to be in the right way. Try and use the first few months of the year to experiment, not perfect. Once you find the time of day that works for your new habits, it makes it easier to repeat your habits. Also, remember that habits can be fast-tracked by emotional responses. You can make real changes when you feel good because you release dopamine. So when you do something positive, your brain is giving you a pat on the back. Creating that positive feeling will mean you are more likely to keep doing it. 

Don’t Chase The Big Goal; Instead, Chase The Small Goal
Small changes will bring big results; small changes make it easy enough to repeat them often enough. If small changes feel rewarding enough and they’re positively framed, we feel like we’re achieving each time. Also, make sure they don’t negatively affect your self-esteem. The small changes are the ones that help boost our motivation and help us gain momentum. When people focus on making one small change, they start to feel successful, and they actually unconsciously start making other changes. For instance, when you get a good night of sleep, things start to naturally fall into place. Well, when you create a small positive change, then a trickle effect will take place in other aspects of your lifestyle. 

Listen to the full episode: The 5 Habit Myths Around Health with Dr. Heather McKee