Why Healthy Habits Don't Stick

It’s not a failure to have sleep debt.

It’s not a failure to eat half a loaf of bread in one sitting.

It’s not a failure to find the bottom of a family packet of Maltesers which you’ve mindlessly inhaled during an episode of MAFS.

I repeat: it’s not a failure.

But that’s what we’re told. By our devices, by society, by that little fascist gremlin in our heads.

I remember a particularly stressful day at uni where I ate 6 pots of Milky Way dessert in the same number of minutes. Did I feel like I’d failed? Of course I did. And I kept my shame hidden and buried. Promising myself I’d ‘do better’.

If eat too many of the things, if we wake up after a rubbish night of sleep, if we have a day in bed without much movement… we’re not good enough. We’ll try harder tomorrow, we promise the wellness gods. We’ll eat nothing but salad and start that running habit and go to bed at 9… tomorrow.

And then, tomorrow comes, with fresh stressors and an email from HR and a letter about your mortgage rate increasing and… of course our mission to appease the wellness gods falls short.

I don’t think this is a you problem; this isn’t a me problem. This is a result of the fact that optimisation and productivity culture — both horribly damaging — are being conflated with wellness culture.

That binary view is reigning strong; move every day, don’t eat carbs, get 9 hours of sleep a night, never binge chocolate… and if you struggle to do this, you’re a failure and you probably need this new app, or supplement, or to go on a strict 20-day diet where you eat nothing but cabbage soup (my step dad did this once when I was a kid. The smell in the house should only be reserved for the 5th circle of hell).

The biggest problem we’re facing when it comes to our health isn’t the ‘incorrect’ sleep / diet / wellness habits, it’s not even the problematic binary thinking…

it’s that we’ve shut off from ourselves.

Suck it up and get it done. Hustle on. Man up. Power through.

We’ve been taught that our bodies are just these sometimes-inconvenient transport mechanisms for our big brains. And then we wonder when sleep doesn’t come easily.

Your wellness isn’t a spreadsheet, or a tracker, or something to ‘optimise’.

Your wellness starts in your belly and your chest and in that nice feeling you get when you smell fresh bread.

We’ve learned to squish everything down. But like an inflatable beachball pressed under water, there’s only so long we can keep it down there until it bounces back to the surface.

What if we learn to let it all be here in the first place?

Ironically, once we allow ourselves to feel again — our emotions, physical sensations, the delight of eating Milky Way desserts — we’ll find that 6 pots of the stuff is actually a bit of a gross idea.

We’ll recognise what our body needs, and respond accordingly.

This is the art of interoception — noticing signals from your body, and allowing them to be here.

It’s not woo-woo, or spiritual, it’s just the simple art of learning how to be a body-and-mindful human.

And in the meantime, be easier on yourself. You can’t fail at the art of feeling.

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