The Perfectionist Trap

How often have you resolved to have a healthier lifestyle by eating better, exercising more, getting enough sleep, taking a multivitamin or reducing your stress, and you start a routine to do one of these things? Yet for one reason or another you stop doing it. You may not even be sure why. Life got in the way.

Do you give up fairly easily because you didn’t do everything right as planned, you missed a few days or you couldn’t do what you set out to do for a whole week? Do you assume you failed because you didn’t do it all perfectly? Who says you failed. Where does that belief come from? Beliefs, if they don’t make sense for you, are things you can change. You can give yourself permission to do what you can, to learn from what gets in the way, and to do what is more realistic for you.

Life always gets in the way, and it is virtually impossible to always eat well and avoid wanting to indulge now and then. It is equally difficult to always fit in your exercising or always get in the full amount of activity planned. The best thing to do when things interfere with your best laid plans is to roll with the flow and make decisions that most honor your needs, knowing you don’t always have full control. When you do that, you can let go of those events or challenging days without judgment and focus on today and setting new goals for the upcoming week.

What matters isn’t about being exact, perfect and doing things just so. It is about setting an intention, doing the best you can, not judging yourself but observing with interest what happened and why, then learning what works better and renewing your intentions based on new insights.

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Make Intentions, Not Resolutions

On New Years millions of people will make resolutions for 2008, driven by things they think they should improve about themselves. Not by what they really want in their life. As a result, most resolutions will be broken within weeks if not days. This is because they won’t be fueled by a passion for something wanted badly enough to make lasting behavioral changes.

Change is hard and you need to really be motivated to get through the days when you are fighting against yourself. If you want the end goal badly enough you will persevere and “just do it”. But if you are doing it to please someone else or because you “should”, you won’t have the drive in you to stick with it until it becomes easier and a part of you and your lifestyle.

A friend of mine, Denise, pointed out to me that there is a difference between making a resolution and an intention, where a resolution suggests we have to overcome what is wrong in our life and an intention is aligning ourselves to our hearts and spirit. While the dictionary doesn’t make much of a distinction between them, I think her view offers a great way to approach the New Year. Instead of making resolutions, think about what you really want in your life and what your values are. What does your heart tell you that you need more of? What are you tolerating that you want to change so that you are happier? What is your body trying to tell you that would make you feel better?

An intention is a clear vision of where you want to go or what you want to achieve. You may want to feel physically freer and better by losing weight, and may even know how much you would like to lose. As important as determining how much you want to lose, you want to know why you want this and what you will get from losing the weight. It might be to feel physically better in a specific way, to feel more sexually appealing to improve a relationship, to have the energy and stamina to do what you love most, or to reduce your risk of a particular illness. Identifying what you really want to accomplish and why strengthens your intention, and it helps you stay clear on why it matters to make a significant change in your lifestyle.

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Lowering Healthcare Costs by Increasing Prevention

A healthy debate is underway to determine what can be done to reduce the cost of health care spending by insurers, employers and individuals. While the primary focus is on the cost of healthcare services, not enough attention is being placed on preventive services for chronic diseases caused by unhealthy lifestyles.

The use of insurance premium discounts for nutrition, wellness and fitness programs are a great start, but these options don't work for many people. These are very often a prescribed set of guidelines with a focus on program compliance. While most people try to comply, the minority tend to succeed and the rest add the experience onto their list of been there, done that and hope not to do that again.

What is missing is a focus on funding programs that help people change their attitudes, reclaim their motivation and find things that are suited to their lives. The programs designed to do this are a blend of life coaching, fitness, nutrition, emotional eating and in some cases psycho therapy. Wellness or healthy lifestyle coaching is new to the healthcare field and understandably difficult to regulate, but it is time to offer the same discounts for coaching that are now offered for gyms, fitness programs and other wellness alternatives. Don't try to regulate coaching. Instead leave choice in the hands of those that know what works best for them. The results will speak for themselves in the reduction of chronic disease.

Don't Try to Rely on Willpower

Willpower is mind over matter, self-discipline and a resolution to control yourself. You probably know by now that willpower doesn’t really help you gain control over your eating or unhealthy lifestyle habits.

But are you blaming yourself for a lack of willpower instead of recognizing that willpower isn’t the right answer in the first place? Are you looking at someone else and judging them for their lack of willpower? People do it all the time, and it doesn’t help anyone. In fact it has the opposite effect. The more you, or someone else, exerts their will to force you to be better, the more you will resent it and ultimately resist it and do the opposite of what was intended. I’ll bet you can think of numerous occasions where this was true.

At a time when there is increasing pressure from employers, doctors and others to force people to lose weight and get healthy, there is an underlying belief that the problem with people who aren’t in shape is simply a lack of willpower. While anyone can will themselves to comply for a period of time, once they stop they will revert back to their old ways or even take on worse habits for an equal or longer period of time.

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Get Healthier or Else Corporate Mandate

Two companies, Clarion Health (Indianapolis) and Scotts (Ohio), announced this year they will charge employees for unhealthy habits. This isn’t just controversial or potentially illegal; it is the worst way to get people to change how they take care of themselves. While on the one hand it does cost less to employ people that choose healthier lifestyles than those that don’t. On the other hand attempting to force these folks to change is going to cost them good employees and morale.

Consider being an employee that is now singled out for not being healthy enough and who makes choices that aren’t always best. They are now in the spot light and more closely scrutinized by their managers and peers. Each time they make an unhealthy choice they will be judged and when their test results prove that they haven’t succeeded in reducing cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, and other levels they will be financially penalized. You might think this will help them and this is a good thing, but what if it were you?

Are you the type to go along and easily make changes under this kind of pressure and force? Some people are and for them it will work. It may be the one thing that will finally gets them on board. But they are in the minute minority. Most people don’t conform so easily when bullied. They may go along at first to keep the peace, but they won’t like it and will soon argue against it. They will cite their right to privacy or claim discrimination, and these are good arguments. But there is something else going on beneath the surface: it is our human nature to rebel against force and want to do what we’re told not to even more.

The better approach is to have a good reason to care about your own health and then be motivated to make changes for yourself on your terms. Many companies now offer health screenings that reveal your risk for disease. If you discover you are at great risk, this can be a powerful wake-up call that gives you the resolve you need to make a change in your habits. When this happens, you are the one that wants to be healthier. You are the one ready to commit to new routines and choices, and you will feel motivated to take action.

Threats and penalties don’t encourage better behavior over the long term; they instill hatred toward healthier habits and a deeper sense of failure and unworthiness. People can use the carrot and stick to enforce behaviors, but there is greater success and morale when those are replaced with baby carrots, apple slices and a reassuring nudge.

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Addressing the Struggle for Compliance

This week I attended a symposium hosted by the Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners Healthcare in Massachusetts. Their focus is on the use of technology to support leading initiatives in telehealth, disease and lifestyle management, and personalized medical care.

What I heard was a frustration by the slow pace at which change is occuring in the healthcare system to address chronic disease, consumer-driven care and poor compliance by patients in disease management despite the advances in technology. Compliance was mentioned repeatedly as a significant problem, but from what I heard it is widely misunderstood by the healthcare community at large.

Compliance is not the right focus. A focus on compliance generates further resistance. A non-judgmental understanding of the issue is what is needed before compliance can be addressed and this needs to be understood not only by healthcare practitioners but also by the consumers of healthcare (the patients). Instead of a carrot and stick approach, people respond far better to baby carrots, apples and nudges when it comes to long term success of lifestyle changes.

Compliance has more practicality to short term results-oriented programs, and these have merit under the right circumstances but fail to demonstrate results for long term sustainability and more often lead to derailment, despondancy and complacency.

Read The Healthy Living Challenge: The Cause of Complacency to understand the real struggle with compliance, the complacency cycle that keeps people stuck and what will help them break free of their unhealthy patterns.