Many of us lead busy lives faced with demands from both our personal and work lives. Between working, attending meetings, commuting, family obligations and all the other activities that fill our schedules, we’re often left with little time for physical activity.

This is alarming as research has established a clear association between physical activity and wellbeing. Studies demonstrate that exercise reduces our risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes and developing several cancers and chronic health conditions. Our mental health similarly benefits physical activity releases endorphins and reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Despite the substantial body of evidence supporting the benefit of exercise, more than 50% of adult Australians don’t meet physical activity guidelines. While often believed that to lead a more active lifestyle one must start regularly going to the gym, taking lengthy walks, or attending fitness classes, simple changes to our daily work routine can accumulate into big differences for our health and wellbeing.

“plant a seed in the right spot and it will grow without coaxing.”

World-renowned Behaviour Scientist, Dr. BJ Fogg, explains in his book “Tiny Habits” that building tiny habits rather than attempting to introduce drastic changes to your lifestyle increases the likelihood of successful long-term behaviour change. Dr. BJ Fogg argues that behaviour change is simple and systematic as long as we design for the behaviours that lead to the outcomes. In other words, if we want to become physically fit, most of the behaviours we need to do to are habits and if we create tiny habits then little by little, we reach the outcome in a reliable way that doesn’t regress or overwhelm us.

It is not often that we don’t know how to change, it’s that we’re lacking the automaticity of doing it. Put another way, we don’t need to train walking around the block, we need to train making it automatic.

Dr. BJ Fogg describes a formula of tiny habits that involves the following three elements.

1. You have some level of motivation. (e.g., you want to get physically fit).
2. You have the ability to do it (e.g., you are physically capable of doing exercises that will improve your fitness).
3. You have a call to action (e.g., when you have your morning coffee you will go for a walk around the block afterwards).

There are two important considerations when using the formula.

• Difficult behaviours require high levels of motivation is hard to sustain. Make the behaviour laughable small instead as they are more likely to get done whether motivation is high or low.
• The call to action is more effective when it is a behaviour that already exists in your life. In other words, use the existing behaviour (e.g., having your morning coffee), as a trigger for the new behaviour (e.g., going for a walk around the block).

The final step for behaviour change is to celebrate the victory, which means rewarding yourself when you do the tiny habit. This could simply be giving yourself a mental ‘high five’ such as telling yourself “I’m awesome!” or doing a little dance.

By implementing tiny habits and increasing them over time, an upward spiral of positive physically active behaviour starts to build. With this is mind, below is a template for developing your own tiny habits with some examples.

If you would like to find out how Steople can help achieve behaviour change within your workplace, contact your local Steople office today.