Live Younger Longer

Celebrating success
As you strive to establish healthy new habits, give yourself ample credit for
each and every achievement. You did your five pushups for the day? Tell
yourself, “Heck, yeah!” You smoked one less cigarette? That deserves a fist
pump.
By promoting the good feelings that come with practicing good habits,
you’ll make those habits more rewarding. And the more rewarding your
brain perceives an action to be, the more you’ll want to do it again
(remember your habenula?).
When you make healthy choices, you start seeing yourself in a more
positive light. And that has a snowball effect. The refreshed feeling that
comes from getting a good night’s rest might sustain your commitment to
eating well throughout the day. And the sense of accomplishment you get

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from caring for your body in those ways could spur you to start cutting back
on your smoking habit. In other words, success in one area can lead to
success in another.
By the same token, a single failure doesn’t mean the end of all successes.
None of us is perfect. We all slip up from time to time. We skip a scheduled
trip to the gym or stay up well past our bedtime. Everyone who successfully
makes changes in his or her life has experienced setbacks.
It’s important to keep in mind that forming new habits isn’t an all-or-
nothing affair. When you get off track, it doesn’t mean all is lost. Remind
yourself that something is better than nothing, even if it’s a fraction of what
you accomplished yesterday. You’re still going in the right direction.
Phasing out old habits
So far, I’ve focused on how to slowly and joyfully start new habits. But
what about all the old habits we want to stop? Whether we want to quit
smoking, cut back on mindless snacking or stress less, old habits can be
hard to change. They can feel like ingrained behaviors, an integral part of
who we are and how we live.
The phrase “Break a bad habit” can be misleading. The memory of a habit
lasts a lifetime. Changing an old habit takes time and must be accomplished
in small steps. As Mark Twain’s famous fictional character Pudd’nhead
Wilson notes in his calendar, “Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the
window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”