Transcript
Speaker: When people make resolutions, they usually try to fix their entire life overnight. I'm going to sleep eight hours. I'm going to eat no outside sugar. I'm going to lift weights four days a week. I'm going meditate every morning. It's a recipe for disaster.
Speaker: That is like trying to juggle five chainsaws at once. You don't even know how to juggle balls yet. You're going to drop all of them and you might lose an arm or two in the process.
Speaker: This is the Home of Health Spam podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
Speaker: Hello, and welcome back to the Home Health Spam podcast. If you are listening to this on the day it releases, it is February 2nd. Now, depending on how your last month went, this date might feel like just another Monday.
Speaker: or it might be a guilty reminder. In the fitness and self-improvement world, we have officially passed a grim milestone on the calendar. Sociologists and data analysts often refer to the time period we just went through as Quitter's Day.
Speaker: There's a famous and frankly, pretty depressing statistic that floats around every single year. By February, approximately 80% of New Year's resolutions have been completely abandoned.
Speaker: So the gym that has been packed for the last month or so will now have plenty of space and time for you to expand as all the others have quit.
Speaker: So maybe you resolve to lose weight, to sleep better or go to bed earlier, maybe even run a marathon this year. And then life happened. Work got busy, the kids got sick, or the motivation just evaporated.
Speaker: And now here we are in February, and for the vast majority of people, the new year new me is already over. But I want to reframe all of that for you right now.
Speaker: If you were part of that 80%, if you've already fallen off the wagon, have good news. You didn't fail because you're weak. You didn't fail because you lack discipline or willpower.
Speaker: You failed because the method was broken. The traditional way we make resolutions, relying on hype, massive overhauls, and sheer grit, is designed to fail.
Speaker: It fights against human biology. It ignores how your brain actually builds habits. So here's the deal. We're not gonna write this year off.
Speaker: We're not gonna wait another 11 months for the next January to just try again the thing that has never worked for us in the past. Instead, we're gonna start fresh today, right here, right now.
Speaker: But we're gonna do it differently this time. We're going to apply the Alively principles. We're going to trade willpower for data, and we're going to trade hustle for strategy.
Speaker: If you give me the next 10 minutes or so, I'm going to show you how to set a goal that is literally too small to fail, but also powerful enough to transform your health by the end of the year.
Speaker: Let's dive in. So let's look at the trap we all fall into. We live in a culture that worships the phrase, go big or go home. We think that for a resolution to count, it has to be massive. It has to be painful.
Speaker: If you haven't run in five years, the resolution is I'm going to run five more and miles every single morning before work. If you have been eating takeout every single night, the resolution somehow is I'm going to do a strict 30 day juice cleanse starting tomorrow.
Speaker: We rely entirely on willpower. Here's the thing about willpower. It's just a battery. It drains. In January, that battery feels fully charged.
Speaker: We've had a break over the holidays, we're ready to go. by February 2nd, the battery is dead. And when the willpower runs out, the behavior stops. This is because massive changes trigger massive resistance.
Speaker: Biologically, your body loves homeostasis. It loves stability. When you introduce a radical shock to the system, like starving yourself or training like an Olympian when you aren't one, your brain doesn't see that as getting healthy.
Speaker: Your brain perceives that as a threat to your wellbeing. It creates friction, it creates pain, and your brain is wired to avoid pain. So every morning when that alarm goes off for the five mile run, your brain is actively fighting you.
Speaker: It's convincing you to stay in bed. And eventually your brain wins. You quit, not because you're lazy, but because you tried to fight millions of years of evolutionary biology with a temporary burst of motivation.
Speaker: And this brings us to the Alively philosophy. At Alively and here at the Home Healthspan, we fundamentally reject the idea that you have to suffer to get healthy. We don't believe in muscling through or white knuckling your way to health and longevity.
Speaker: We believe in data, we believe in focus, and we believe in actions that are actually sustainable. If you hate the process, you won't stick with the process.
Speaker: And if you don't stick with it, you don't get results. It's that simple. So we stop trying to be heroes for two weeks and we start trying to be consistent for a lifetime.
Speaker: But how do we do that? start by making the action so small, you literally cannot say no to it. So let's get into the solution. This is the Alively framework, the exact same logic we use to build our technology.
Speaker: And it's the logic you are going to use to rebuild your healthy habits. The first step is to isolate the variable. When people make resolutions, they usually try to fix their entire life overnight.
Speaker: I'm going to sleep eight hours. I'm going to eat no outside sugar. I'm going to lift weights four days a week. I'm going meditate every morning. It's a recipe for disaster. That is like trying to juggle five chainsaws at once.
Speaker: You don't even know how to juggle balls yet. You're going to drop all of them and you might lose an arm or two in the process. In science, if you want to understand what works, you change one variable at a time.
Speaker: We need to apply the same logic to your life. So right now, and want you to pick one specific area of your health span to improve. Just one. Is it your sleep?
Speaker: Is it the movement of your body? Is it your nutrition or body composition? Is it your stress levels? Or maybe it's your social connection.
Speaker: Don't say all of them. Don't even say more than one. If you try to fix everything, you fix nothing. Give yourself permission to put the other categories on maintenance mode. Pick the one area that if you improved it, you would get the biggest return on investment right now.
Speaker: Let's lock that in Once you have your focus, we're going to now move to step two. We're going to measure what matters. There's an old business adage that is absolutely true for your health as well.
Speaker: You can't manage what you don't measure. Most people fail at resolutions because they rely on feelings. They say, I want to feel healthier, but feeling healthier is vape. On a bad day, you might feel terrible, even if you're making great progress biologically.
Speaker: We need to take your feelings out of the driver's seat and put data into the driver's seat. So you need to pick a specific metric that ties to the focus area you just chose in step one.
Speaker: If you pick sleep, maybe it's the amount of deep sleep you get a night if you track at that level of granularity, or maybe it's the total amount of sleep you get at night, or how consistently you go to bed at the same time.
Speaker: If it's movement, maybe it's your daily step count or the number of days or minutes that you get to the gym do a workout each week. If it's your cardiovascular health, maybe it's your resting heart rate.
Speaker: There are metrics within any of these pillars and they can be measured easily with wearables like your Whoop or your Oura Ring or Apple Watch. ah Blood work is easier to get than ever thanks to function and superpower and so many others. But pick something very specific.
Speaker: When you have a hard number, you have a scoreboard. You stop guessing. You stop wondering if it's working. You look at the data and the data tells you the truth. So pick your focus, pick your metric.
Speaker: Now, how do we actually move the needle on that number? That brings us to step three. This is the secret sauce. This is the difference between a resolution that lasts two weeks and a habit that lasts lifetime.
Speaker: We call this the minimum enjoyable action or MEA. Notice I didn't say minimum viable action. I said enjoyable. Here's a definition.
Speaker: You need to find an action that is too small to fail, but crucially must also contain a spark of joy for you. Let's go back to the running example. The old way says, I'm going to go run five miles at 5 a.m.
Speaker: That is big. That is painful. When the alarm goes off, our brain says, no we're not. The minimum enjoyable action is I'm going to put on my running shoes and walk to the of the driveway and listen to my favorite song.
Speaker: And my favorite song I can only listen to on that walk down the driveway. That's it. That's the whole goal. Takes a few minutes. It requires zero effort and it gives you little boost. The only way to hear that delightful song that you love so much is to get up, put on your shoes and walk down the driveway.
Speaker: And here's why it works. It bypasses your brain's resistant radar. Your brain isn't afraid of walking down the driveway and it's looking forward to listening to your favorite song. By doing this, you're effectively hacking your own physiology and psychology.
Speaker: You're proving to yourself every single day that you're the type of person who shows up. You're shifting your identity before you worry about the intensity. And that leads directly to step four, the compound effect, or what I like to call the psychology of winning.
Speaker: Human beings are wired to love winning. When you set a goal that's too small to fail, like walking down your driveway and you actually do it, chalk up a win.
Speaker: You check the box, you get a hit of dopamine. You feel successful because you are. And guess what? Success is addictive. When you consistently win at your habit, you start to crave that feeling and want more of it.
Speaker: You stop dreading the workout and start looking forward to the win. And here's the magic. As you stack these wins day after day, and to naturally want to do more. You get to the end of the driveway and think, I'm already here and the song isn't over.
Speaker: Might as well just walk around the block. But, and this is a big, but you only build on the action when the previous step feels automatic. Don't rush this.
Speaker: If walking to the driveway feels hard one morning, just walk to the driveway. That was the win that counts. but eventually it will become boring. It will become too easy. That's your brain telling you you're ready for the next step.
Speaker: That is how you transform. Not by sprinting until you collapse on February 2nd, but by taking small, enjoyable steps that compound and into massive results over time.
Speaker: Now, I know what some of you might be thinking right now. You're thinking, okay, walking to the driveway sounds nice or doing one push-up sounds easy, but I want real results. I'm an adult. want to see my body change.
Speaker: You might feel like easy means ineffective, but I need you to hear this. This isn't just a nice-sounding theory. This isn't just self-help fluff. We see the proof of this method in the hard data every single day.
Speaker: When we look at the Alively user base, people just like you who decided to stop guessing and start measuring, the numbers are staggering. The majority of Alively users see greater than a 20% improvement in their chosen metric in their first month alone.
Speaker: Let that sink in. A 20% improvement in your resting heart rate, your sleep efficiency, your activity levels in just 30 days. And here's the kicker.
Speaker: They didn't get that result by grinding themselves into the ground. They didn't get it by suffering for four weeks straight. They got it because they were consistent. They stopped the cycle of boom and bust where you work out for three hours on Monday and then you can't move until Thursday.
Speaker: They replace that with small, smart, consistent actions that they could actually stick to and that they do actually stick to. The data proves that consistency beats intensity every single time.
Speaker: And that 20% bump, it's just the beginning. So I want you to project yourself forward. Today's February 2nd. The hype of the new year is gone.
Speaker: The gym, as we said, are quieting down. But if you adopt this too small to fail approach today, where will you be in 11 months? Imagine waking up next January while everyone else is hungover, scrambling to write down the exact same resolutions they wrote this year, feeling that same sense of panic and regret, and somehow magical thinking that this year will for the first time be different than every year before it.
Speaker: You will be different. You won't be starting over. You'll be continuing and building. You'll have 11 months of compounded data, 11 months of small wins stacked on top of each other.
Speaker: You have built an identity that's unbreakable. You won't be someone who tries to be healthy. You'll be someone who is healthy. That's the transformation.
Speaker: That is the difference between a New Year's resolution and a healthspan strategy. So here's your challenge. Do not turn off this podcast and go about your day. Please take 60 seconds right now to do this.
Speaker: First, pick your area. Is it sleep, movement, nutrition, and body composition, your mindset, or social connection? Just pick one.
Speaker: Number two, pick your metric within that. What number are you going to watch? Give yourself a scoreboard. Number three, define what your minimum enjoyable action for that metric will be.
Speaker: What is the thing that is so small and has just enough joy in it that you can't say no? Write it down. Put it on a sticky note on your bathroom mirror. Put it on your calendar.
Speaker: Or get the Alively app and we'll help you. We don't need a calendar to tell us when we're allowed to change. We don't need to wait for the ball to drop in Times Square. We start today.
Speaker: We start small. And then we keep going. Don't wait for the new year. Don't wait for 2027. Your health span starts now. Go make it too small to fail.
Speaker: Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast. And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other Healthspan role models on Alively.com.
Speaker: Enjoy a lively day.
