At the core of every New Year's resolution is a desire to live our best lives. Every January, we resolve to save more money, eat better, and get fit. In fact, according to the statistics aggregator platform Statista.com, 45% of New Year's resolutions in the U.S. are health-related. We buy new running shoes, subscribe to the latest fitness apps, listen to motivational audiobooks, and save inspiring quotes on all our devices. And yet, despite our good intentions, the fall rate for follow through on those resolutions is consistently around 80%. Health-related goals, in particular, are often the first casualty, as early as the third week of January, according to research from the University of Scranton. So how do you win your New Year's goals if motivation alone will not sustain your efforts? According to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, "It's about building the daily habits that allow you to stick to a schedule and overcome challenges."
Good Lifestyle Habits Set Us Up for Success
In Atomic Habits, author Clear highlights a case study of the British Cycling team's adoption of a series of "micro-habits" that eventually led to an unprecedented, 10-year championship run between 2007 and 2017, where the team won a record 178 world championships. Each team member adopted new lifestyle habits on and off the track, optimizing everything from what beds they slept on, to where they put their car keys to get out of the house quickly and arrive to practice less stressed. The compounding of productive, results-driven, habitual actions - much more than mere motivation - made all the difference.
Good Decision-Making Habits Optimize Our Daily Routines
What the most common reason for giving up on New Year's resolutions? Feeling overwhelmed has a lot to do with the large number of decisions we make each day. By some estimates, we make over 35,000 big and small decisions every day. The toll it has on our mental capacity is exactly why we decide we don't feel like going to the gym at the end of a long day. Incorporating habits automates our daily decisions so that we make good choices consistently. Pre-packing your gym bag, pre-loading your workout playlist, and going straight to the gym after work, will go a long way to making your fitness routine a habit rather than inspiration.
Good Nutrition Habits Improve Our Mental Performance
The food we habitually eat has a significant impact on our cognitive attention to complete even the most mundane tasks because poor nutritional choices can lead to low-grade, systemic inflammation which in turn, can lead to the mental sluggishness we attribute to brain fog. A recent study from the University of Birmingham's Centre for Human Brain Health found that "... people with systemic inflammation may have to exert more cognitive effort to achieve the same level of attention-related performance as those with less inflammation." The easiest way to improve our nutritional intake is to habitually support our diet with quality supplements. In particular, the botanical supplement turmeric has demonstrated a wide range of benefits in supporting cognitive health. It does this by disrupting the chronic inflammation cycle. The caveat is to use a supplement formulated to provide full bioavailability and that means avoiding turmeric supplements that use black pepper or piperine to enhance potency.
Black pepper and piperine are used in turmeric supplements as "non-selective" absorption enhancers that can have adverse effects by allowing toxin absorption through the gut lining. Nuvothera, a super micronized turmeric supplement, uses a process that reduces the size of the turmeric molecule so that it is easily absorbed without chemical enhancers and has been clinically demonstrated to increase potency 100 times over other brands.
Take High Potency Turmeric to Help Fight COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic is characterized by an overactive inflammatory response. Coronavirus poses a significant risk to those with a compromised immune system, such as psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis and many other inflammation-based chronic conditions. Now more than ever, we need to keep our immune systems strong. The good news is we can actively strengthen our immunity reduce inflammation by taking a turmeric supplement every day. Turmeric is the holy grail of anti-inflammatory medicinal herbs. It is packed with curcuminoids that have powerful, antiviral, and antioxidant properties. Scientific studies show curcumin helps alleviate depression, detoxify the body, boost immunity, and inhibit virus replication in human cells. It's so powerful that it matches the effectiveness of some anti-inflammatory drugs, without harmful side effects. Curcumin fights inflammation at the molecular level. It has been studied to lower histamine levels, a chemical known to trigger an inflammatory response. But you need to take a potent one, like Nuvothera's Super-Micronized Turmeric Curcumin to get the medicinal benefit.
Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. - Jim Rohn
Motivation shouldn't be entirely discounted, of course, it is after all the "why" of what makes us take on a new resolution. In Atomic Habits, author Clear closes with this practical advice, "Pleasure and satisfaction are what sustain a behavior, feeling motivated gets you to act, feeling successful gets you to repeat [the behavior]."If we dig a little deeper, we'll find that under the why, is a desire to feel a certain way. To achieve that feeling, we need to build an infrastructure that will support our desires. Especially during the critical early weeks of the year when the work needed to achieve our New Year's resolutions becomes hard or the amount of work left to complete them seems daunting.
And good habits are the infrastructure that allows us to feel satisfied, successful, and motivated to keep going. Start with micro-habits as simple as taking Nuvothera Super-Micronized Turmeric each day and build on success from there!
