Tag: habits

Day 27 – are your cogs dissonating?

I am aware that as we come into the last few days of Dry January I have not really provided anything helpful in terms of how you can make changes and stick to them, be it in relation to drinking, smoking, dieting or exercising. I will try to redress the balance over the next couple of posts or so. Some of the material can then be replicated in the main body of this website as static pages that people can more easily access. It is after all a self-help website, although I do have problems with that terminology. It does carry (unintentionally) undertones of “pull yourself together” and “I did it and therefore so can you“. What works for one person may not work for another, and everyone has a different starting point.

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Day 6 – for sticks and sticking

As part of my drive towards improving my health and well-being, I took advantage of the sunshine this morning to dust down my homemade bo stick and did some gentle drills after not doing any drills for the past three months. I remembered some moves from my martial arts training (Tang Soo Do) and found a lot of other stuff on-line. When I say homemade, I mean I stripped the bark from a stick and sanded it down. That level of DIY is pretty good for me.

And talking of sticks, I thought today I would write something about sticking. By this I mean how difficult it can be to stick to those important changes we want to make. Here we are looking at a key stage of the change cycle – maintenance. No, not cycle maintenance – this is a reference to the Stages of Change model proposed by Prochaska and DiClemente that is widely used in the area of behavioural change (e.g., eating habits, drinking, gambling, smoking, and other health related behaviours).

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Day 2 – calories and start of trivia quiz

It is early evening and all is well. Still on track with my abstinence from alcohol. It is probably too early to report any obvious benefits at this stage, There have been no cravings but it has necessitated a shift in my thinking and in how I organise my time, as noted in my introductory Dry January post on New Year’s Eve. It really is about changing habits, both behaviourally and cognitively. I try to keep in mind that I am not depriving myself of something (although that is how it might feel at times), but rather I am exploring new ways to experience life. That sounds very noble, but really it isn’t! I’m a bit like Charlie Brown – he couldn’t play baseball but he could talk a good game.

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In the Beginning…

Dry January was started by Alcohol Change UK in 2013. The thinking behind it was to encourage people to examine their alcohol drinking, especially after a period of traditional celebrations where alcohol often features quite prominently. It fits in nicely with making New Year resolutions that involve a degree of self-improvement – whether this be about food choices, being more active, learning new skills, giving up smoking, or any of another hundred ways we could all be “better people”.

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