The Psychology of Healthy Living

Let’s touch on some key psychological principles that will help you live a sustainable, healthy life. If you find this to be a struggle, it’s likely you’re falling short in at least one of these areas.

The first principle, one that underlies habit change of all kinds, is that to truly sustain health-promoting habits, we must experience change at the level of our identity. 

What does this mean? It means that you must go from being identified as an unhealthy person striving to be healthy (and usually never quite succeeding) to a healthy person identified as such.

If you experience change at this level, living the kind of life we advocate at Shift It will be a natural extension of who you are, rather than a struggle or battle. If you don’t, you’ll likely spin your wheels for years and years, trying to change your habits yet never quite succeeding.

Just how you undergo this transformation is a little beyond the scope of this short article, but we’ve found it comes down to implementing habits over and over again until they become automatic. When they are, you no longer need to try to uphold them, and this shows that your identity, your habitual self and all its behaviours, has altered.

Another critical thing is to value the long term. This is fundamental to any attempt to install lasting habits, and especially in the realm of health. Many of our issues come because we are addicted to short-term pleasures, like smoking, alcohol, donuts, cake, pizza and burgers, whose pleasure-based payoffs are immediate. 

Not only do we fail to see the value of healthy living because its payoffs aren’t so immediate, we’re blind to the damage that our bad habits will bring if sustained for long enough. Always think months and years down the line when it comes to health. Base your habits on what is valuable long term and what will endure, not what will offer you the quick hit. You’ll be very, very thankful for it.

This might sound like self-denial or puritanism, but we believe it’s the opposite. Quick hits are highly artificial pleasures, filled with unnatural tastes, and overstimulating. Just like tech addiction reduces your attention span and tolerance for boredom, creating a vicious cycle, unhealthy food, alcohol, cigarettes and other short-term pleasure hits do the same. 

You end up enslaved to highly unhealthy and artificial consumption, and you can’t get out, because you can’t tolerate anything that doesn’t pack the same punch. This applies not only to food and drink but to all health-related habits, including exercise, tech fasts, spiritual practices, and more.

The key is to change your palette over time so that you appreciate the natural, the subtle and the challenging. Sometimes this will require sustained training and behaviour change, other times we suddenly realise the terrible habits we’re caught up in and immediately begin to set things straight. In any case, when you are healthy, you start to see these quick hits as disgusting, addictive and low-quality. This is the palette change that is required.