Wellness Tips - Peak Season

Today's message launches our 8-part ProActive Health and Wellness Series designed for our financial partners. Our goal is to provide you with strategies and resources that can improve the way you navigate peak time in your practice - often RRSP/ tax season. 

We are working with our health and wellness partners in bringing you tips from experts in:

• ergonomics
• nutrition
• self-care
• and physical wellness activities you can quickly and easily do at your desk. 

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Making Right Choices

Making the right choices for health and well-being can be challenging. Although we know what is good for us and how we can improve, we may not act on it, or if we do, we may, in due course, slide back to familiar ways. Human behavior — what we do, how we do it, and whether we will succeed — is influenced by many factors, 2 of which are of particular relevance when it comes to wellness: self-discipline and habits. 

You may already have established habits for RRSP/ tax season - ensuring you have your "standing order" organized for meal delivery, spending more quality time with your friends and family, putting deposits into the relationship bank account before the time hits where there will be more withdrawals made. Some of you will have good habits and others will have "bad" habits - those that negatively impact your health like not sleeping enough, smoking more, consuming more alcohol, or living on convenience store / packaged food.

You might even intend that "this year will be different"; however, you have not set yourself up with a successful plan so this year really will be different.

In our family, it isn't "tax season": it's "seeding" and "harvest". During those peak times, healthy habits sometimes take a back seat to getting 'er done! Long hours coupled with Mother Nature's often challenging weather offerings complicate operations to "get it in" and "get it off" during the ever-changing growing season. Some things we can control and others... well, not so much! 

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Self-Discipline

Self-discipline, aka willpower, is central to effective human functioning.  According to the Psychology Glossary, it is “our ability to direct our behavior and control our impulses so that we meet certain standards, achieve certain goals, or reach certain ideals” (Click here to read more about Self Regulation).

Unfortunately, self-discipline requires mental energy. The brain is lazy, always looking for ways to conserve energy (i.e., save effort). Self-discipline may work in the short term, but in the long run, we need better habits and routines so we don't need to rely on willpower.

Habits

Habits, on the other hand, require very little energy.  Accountants & wealth managers are really good at establishing routines, habits, checklists, and workflow routines. Applying that same skillset to personal health and wellness will go a long way to create personal health routines that require little time and energy consciously thinking about and deciding on them.  

With the cognitive economy and performance efficiency of habits, the brain can conserve self-discipline strength to focus on the important decisions in life and free us to engage in thoughtful activities, such as reflecting on the past and planning for the future.

Habits are powerful. Habits, in fact, are key to wellness. For better or worse, habits very much influence health, well-being, and quality of life. If you are striving to improve these, you need to think about habits, because if you change your habits for the better, you change your life for the better.

Habits are difficult to change. It’s not just a matter of will-power (i.e., self-discipline); it’s a matter of rewiring the brain. To change a habit, you need to create new routines: Keep the old cue or antecedent and deliver the old reward (result/consequence), but insert a new routine (behavior). 

Easy as A, B, C!

Antecedent -> Behaviour -> Consequence

We can maximize the probabilities for success with 2 essentials: self-awareness and strategies. Both are indispensable to successful habit formation.

On our farm, we have created new habits over the years, including spending more quality time with family in the months leading up to our peak seasons. We are more intentional about developing new healthy habits. Most recently, humans across the globe have adopted new hand-washing and sanitizing habits.

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 Self-Awareness

Change becomes much more achievable if you pay attention to who you are and insert routines that take advantage of your strengths, tendencies, and aptitudes. With self-awareness, you can cultivate the habits that work for you.

Consider, for instance, differences in circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms reflect our natural tendencies for sleeping and waking and influence our energy and productivity at different times in the day. The odds of success to improve your fitness won’t increase if, for example, you decide to rise an hour earlier to exercise each day when you happen to be a “night owl” rather than a “morning lark.”

Self-awareness includes knowledge about other aspects of self as well, such as whether you are a marathoner, sprinter, or procrastinator; under- or over-buyer; simplicity or abundance lover; finisher or opener; and familiarity or novelty lover.

It also includes whether you are promotion- or prevention-focused and whether you like taking small or big steps.

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 Strategies

Change also becomes more achievable if you choose strategies that enhance your chance for success.

Such strategies include:

• monitoring and scheduling
• investing in systems of accountability
• abstaining
• increasing or decreasing convenience
• planning safeguards
• detecting rationalizations and false assumptions
• using distractions, rewards, and treats
• pairing activities, and beginning with habits that directly strengthen self-control.

Most successful habit change requires the coordination of multiple strategies to establish a single new behavior. New habits, on average, take 66 days to form, so the more strategies used, the better!

Your Wellness Journey

Wellness is a journey. Over the next 8 issues of the ProActive Health & Wellness Series, we will raise your awareness of the need to adopt healthier habits, support your desire to make healthier choices, share knowledge, tips and strategies to increase your ability to effect change in your life. 

Please let us know if there is a topic you'd like to dig deeper with.

Our next issue brings a discussion of the 12 Dimensions of Wellness. Watch for it next week!

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Stay Safe. Stay Well.