Skip to main content

Habit formation

Frowning Nun Meme - Imgflip

Work to Solve your Resolve

It is almost the New Year which is a common time for resolutions and now is as good a time as any to start thinking about them.

Most of us make a resolution, maybe stick with it for a few weeks and then back to our old habits.  I think about 9% of people actually stick with their New Year's Resolutions.  There are a lot of reasons for this.  The goals may be too overwhelming or too ambitious or it may just be a destination without a road map.

As a for instance, the most common resolutions (per Reader's Digest) are "get in shape", "lose weight", "enjoy life to the fullest", "spend less, save more", "get organized" and "spend more time with family and friends".

All great goals to shoot for but for basically all of those, you need a plan for how to even get started and it almost always comes back to changing a habit, which is about the hardest thing one can do.  The idea is that you develop habits because you get a cue and then get a reward from doing an action - I put the kids to sleep which cues me to go and sit down and have a beer and watch something on TV with my wife because the reward is feeling more relaxed and a time to catch up on the day, butthere is probably a better way to do things.

That's why I think now is a good time to start thinking about a change you want to make because it takes time and maybe some help and research to figure out how to do that.

I like this diagram as a starting off point

(there are plenty others like it online and this was just one of the first that came along but I think it's a good walkthrough)

- Relax and listen to guided imagery audio programs to help you reduce stress, focus on healthy changes, and promote healing. Browse more than 20 topics ranging from preparing for successful surgery or childbirth to managing stress and pain. Go to http://kp.org/guidedimagery and listen online or download to your mobile device.


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen).  Those are the over-the-counter ones.  Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on.  All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation.  However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock.  every other organ system that you have.  The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...
Read more

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before.  For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder.  When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?"  The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth.  The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...
Read more

Pain

Sorry to be a pain I would say about 90% of the comments I hear from people about their pain threshold is that they think they have a high pain tolerance.  Which is statistically impossible unless I just attract people who have a high pain tolerance. We traditionally ask people to rate their pain on a 1-10/10 scale and while we hear a lot of 9's and 10's, I would say that, having been present for a number of them, a 10/10 would be giving birth to a first child.  For those who haven't experienced that, my old psychiatry resident described it as "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you would not be in any more pain than you are now" (he was also a former Marine sniper which might explain that). But this is pretty pervasive throughout the medical system and got me wondering as to how people's understanding of what their pain threshold was matched up to what it really was.  Fortunately, there were researchers who had a yen to poke peopl...
Read more