If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you.
“Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems”. James Clear
Last post we talked about your health being an ecosystem. It’s also an ecosystem within an ecosystem, and that’s actually the magic.
We are a system of systems - our cells make our tissues make our organs make our organ systems make our organism. No system on the body ever works alone. Never gets injured alone. Never heals alone. There is no such thing as an isolated injury. There is no such thing as isolated healing. You are only as strong and resilient as your most vulnerable system.
And our habits are also our systems, our outputs from our systems: our energy, our productivity, our passions enthusiasm dreams and our failures too. Those habits might seem stuck or predetermined but creating the conditions, the framework for their delivery based on tried and tested actions we enjoy and that work for you, we can inevitably make time our ally.
The human body is complex, it's not complicated. Our days are full of ‘all the things’ some happy, other stressful, occasionally amazing, more often mundane. And it’s the ‘more often’ part we have the most time in, the most control over, don’t you think?
It’s in this ‘mundane’, or ordinary life, where we can set ourselves up for success. Because if we can get the ordinary dialled in, there’s going to be an automaticity and the extraordinary can be reached out of sheer curiosity! Simply: give the body what it needs and then get out of the way. I’m calling it a ‘good start’:
Good food
Good water
Good people
Good breathing
Good energy
Good thoughts
Good movement
Good lymph and blood flow
Good nature, especially sun
My life mission is to be available to do the things that being alive will allow me, as much as it allows me, for as long as I can. It’s my definition of health. I want to live, wear and eat an energetic lifestyle, so much so that it’s brimming over me into those around me so we can then share healthy some more to those around us again. It’s easy to forget we live in a ecosystem that thrives on reciprocity, that instead our view of wellness is limited to taking care of our individual ‘bodies’. But luckily that’s where health begins: within each of us.
You don’t need better willpower, you need better systems.