Random Wellness Doesn't Work: Why Your Habits Aren't Changing

Believe it or not, as a health coach and corporate wellness consultant, I have something in common with the US Tax Code.

Some aspects of the code are used to incentivize desired behaviors or investments and disincentivize undesired behaviors or investments (now, whose desired and undesired is a larger can of works for another post.) .

For example, when an employer sets aside a portion of an employee’s income for their retirement and it’s not taxed. It’s to incentivize the individual having money for retirement. The government wants to encourage that desired behavior because it’s better for it and the individual.

There are incentives to encourage parents to save for college, to encourage more individuals to go to college, which presumably improves the labor market.

There are deductions for charitable contributions, to persuade people to make such contributions because it benefits society/the community.

There are several deductions and credits written into the US tax code. One term for this is social engineering.

And this is, in a way, what I help my clients do to create their desired behaviors and drop their “bad habits.”

I call it strategic friction, and I’m not alone. It’s the simple idea that you want to make the desired actions easy or more appealing, and the undesired actions hard or less appealing.

Simple concept, hard to do by yourself.

The Art & Science of Strategic Friction

It’s hard because:

• there’s so much noise it’s hard to know what’s legit and what’s BS

• people are caught in a busy cycle and rarely take time for self-awareness and reflection to hone in on what they really need and why

we are programmed to act on our immediate needs rather than our long-term goals

• our brains love routines and aren’t great at thinking, so without that awareness and strategy, changing routines is hard

There are several more reasons but that’s a good starting place. To truly master new habits, you have to be strategic. You have to experiment with what works and what doesn’t. You have to look at the current habit, and ask yourself:

• Why isn’t this working?

• What would work better?

• How can I get myself to do this?

• Is that really going to meet the underlying need, and solve the underlying problem?

• What have I tried before? Why didn’t it work?

• How can I make this new action as easy and fun as possible?

Then, you have to give yourself permission to experiment. You might not find the most effective incentive right away, and that’s okay. It’s part of the discovery process. (The tax code gets adjusted, and so do your incentives 😉).

Random Wellness Doesn’t Work

One of the biggest reasons that efforts to lose weight, exercise more, boost employee wellness, sleep better, meditate, etc. don’t work in the long run (or even sometimes the short run) is because they are random. There is no strategy and friction isn’t used effectively.

There is certainly friction. It comes in the form of an emotional reaction to the “yummy but bad foods” being taken away, the challenge of the workout, the eye-rolls at the latest workplace wellness lunch-n-learn or step challenge, the feeling that you’re too busy to meditate or sleep more, etc…

There’s an emotional response because the new behavior hasn’t been made easy or desirable. It’s been forced. It’s hard, it feels like work, and no one wants more of that.

So we set ourselves up for failure and then beat ourselves up when we fail. And then we think wellness doesn’t work, or at least that it doesn’t work for us.

When all that’s missing is a simple strategy. A way to identify what you really need and want, why, and how to shape it to become the “easy button.”

For example, discovering that you don’t really want the afternoon coffee, you just need some fresh air, some sunlight. So instead of going to get coffee, you now have a 5-minute walk, and you do that with a colleague so you both hold each other accountable. And you do not walk in front of the coffee shop. You get the energy boost, feel connected to a friend, and you’ve saved $3-$5 each day you do this. Plus, without the late afternoon caffeine, your sleep improves. And your body feels better because you got up and moved around more than you were before.

Another example, you discover that your biggest challenge with going to bed “on time” is that in the moment, you forget. You’re caught up in a show, or social media, or both, and your best intentions go out the window. And you live alone, so there’s no one to nudge you. So you put your lights on timers to shut off 30 minutes before bedtime. When they go off, it reminds you that it’s time to get ready for bed, and pulls you out of the engrossing activity, so you are reminded of your goal and are more likely to do it.

Random wellness doesn’t work. Strategic, systematic wellness does.

As Edwards Deming said, “A bad system beats a great person any day of the week.”

It’s not that you can’t do whatever health/wellness thing you want to do. It’s that you don’t have someone helping you use strategic friction to build a system of long-term success.

If you’d like to explore how I can help you make that change, click here to get on my calendar for a complimentary discovery call.