Microshift Will Change Your Life, Not Your Epiphany
How many people are thinking about the New Year, ready to get up at 5 a.m. and go to the gym, or quit drinking cold turkey, or spend two hours every weekend learning to play a new instrument? And how many of these people fail?
In fact, most of them, which is not news to anyone. We know that solutions for which we set an arbitrary start and end date are not always up to date. We’re not going to turn into, for example, the next Yo-Yo Ma after three workouts. This is because a “breakthrough”, any change in our life for the better, does not happen by itself. Like luck, it takes work .
“Stunning and unusual breakthrough is not something that changes your life,” writes Brianna Vista for Medium . “There is a microshift.” She continues:
Think of micro-changes as tiny changes in your daily life. Microshift is changing what you eat in one portion of one meal only once. Then he does it a second time. And the third one. Before you even know what is happening, you have internalized a certain pattern of behavior.
In the end, these tiny changes will lead to big changes. You look back a year or two and things will be different. Your new behavior or attitude will fall into place and you will see the world in a different way. “Lasting and pervasive change does not give us radical moments of action, but a restructuring of our habits,” Wist writes.
In other words, there will likely never be a moment when an apple falls on your head and you suddenly find out the answers to all the problems you were trying to solve. You have to start small and continue like this every day.
“If you want to spend less time with your phone, deny yourself the opportunity to check it once today. If you want to eat healthier foods, drink half a glass of water today. If you want more sleep, go to bed 10 minutes earlier than last [night], ”Wist writes.
Any habit you want to develop takes practice and the realization that you are not going to implement it right away. Whether it’s saving money , running a few miles, or learning classical music , you won’t experience a dramatic shift and suddenly lose $ 10,000 , or you can run a marathon , or discover Mozart’s entire catalog . But if you’ve committed yourself to something and committed yourself to something for an extended period, micro-change will get you where you want to go.