6 Ways You Sabotage Your Well-Being Efforts in Midlife

We all know the importance of a healthy lifestyle, especially in midlife. We have all tried, at different stages of our lives, to eat better, exercise more, and lose weight to be healthier. In midlife though, it is harder. Our bodies are not the same as when we were in our 20s or even in our 30s. On top of that, often we do not make it easy ourselves. Here are 6 ways you sabotage your well-being efforts in midlife.

Getting Too Attached to Specific Goals

Setting a goal can be helpful. It gives you something to aim for, a metric of success to celebrate when achieved. It usually works well in business and in competitive sports.

But there is an essential difference between business or sports performance and health.

Quarterly profits and athletic achievements are time-bound. There’s an event you are working towards – quarterly review or the championship.

But health is not an event. Health is a state of being and as such, it does not make much sense to put rigid metrics and timelines on it.

Our goal is to be healthy for as long as possible, not just in the first quarter of the year. So if you want to be measuring anything at all, it should only be for one reason – to learn the impact of various actions on your personal well-being.

This is because getting too attached to specific and measurable goals can lead to frustration. It can also stand in the way of accomplishing our ultimate goal – achieving better health.

Taking Daily Measurements Seriously

For most people in midlife one of the most common objectives is to lose weight. And if you are one of these people, you probably weigh yourself and set a target to lose X by Y. And then, you weigh yourself every day.

Don’t tell me that you have not been frustrated and confused by what you see on the scale from one day to another.

I was doing the same, and it was driving me crazy. Many times it was not making any sense. I was eating all the right things the day before, and my weight was up and vice-versa.

The reason for this is the body’s liquids retention which can fluctuate a lot from one day to another. To avoid this frustration, it is best not to weight yourself very often.

A better approach to measuring your progress is to feel how you fit in your clothes.

An alternative – if you are like me and you like to measure everything – is only to consider weight averages. Although I weight myself almost daily, I completely ignore the daily weight. I just measure my progress with my monthly average.

Going for Streaks

Achieving a good streak feels good.

30 continuous days of meditation
60 continuous days walking at least 5,000 steps
10 continuous weeks with doing at least two workouts etc.

Sometimes though, streaks can work against us. This happens at the time we break them.

Most of us are quite busy. We juggle work, family, friends, community activities and more – and we tend to fill our calendars to the max. It only takes one unplanned event, and the streak is over.

When that happens (and it WILL happen!), we risk falling into one of the following traps:

A) Putting unnecessary stress on yourself to beat it in the future
B) Seeing it as a failure, “I lost a 25-day … streak”, instead of a big success “I gained 25 days of …”

If you break an unusually long streak, you risk feeling like you will never be able to repeat it and breaking the good habit altogether.

But what if you like streaks? Celebrate them when you break them and continue with the new practice!

It’s much better to have the total of 300 days of running in a year than a single 100-day streak.

Trying to Go at It with Will Power

For seeds to grow into plants, they need fertile soil. No matter how healthy a seed may be, it will not grow if we plant it in the desert.

The same goes for our well-being efforts. Unfortunately, will power, is not very powerful.

If you have always been a junk-food guy, what are your chances in succeeding in a healthy diet if you still join your friends every day in the burger joint?

What are your chances of success if you have a sweet tooth and you do not get rid of the sugary snacks from your home?

That’s right, that will be close to zero!

So, before you embark on your well-being journey, make sure that you set yourself up for success and not for failure. Create the right environment, one that supports your efforts. This will most likely entail making some lifestyle adjustments. Do not neglect this.

The environment you create around your well-being efforts is a stronger success predictor than your will power: clean out the cupboards of those Doritos and make friends with people who like similar well-being activities with you.

Not Prioritizing Well-Being

Midlife is a period in our lives when we realize how precious time is.

Without looking into your next week’s calendar, I can bet that it already seems quite packed. I am also sure that most of the things are important. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.

But, how important are all those activities in comparison to your well-being? How many of those activities promote your health?

Our usual approach is trying to squeeze our well-being activities into the a calendar that is already full.

Walk daily for 15′ after lunch, gym on Monday and Thursday at 20:00, and yoga on Saturday at 9:00.

And then, life happens! Got off work late on Monday, no time for the gym. Needed to catch up on sleep after a long week, missed yoga class on Saturday.

And thank god life is happing! It would be unbearably dull if everything were going exactly as planned. However, if we are just trying to squeeze our wellness activities into an already busy schedule, guess what we sacrifice first?

Precisely, our well-being.

I am sure I do not have to convince you of the importance of health and the impact of being full of energy in our everyday lives.

A better strategy to go about it is this. Instead of trying to jam your well-being activities into your calendar, try the opposite. Place your well-being activities first, before everything else.

I have discovered that no matter how much I try, my completion success on the weekly well-being activities is 50% on average.

So, double-up! If you shoot for two days in the gym weekly, you better schedule four.

The worst thing that can happen, you make all four.

Don’t worry about overtraining. In the past two years that I followed this approach, I have managed to complete them all only once.

The Story We Tell Ourselves

We all have an identity, a story that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we stand for. We need it to function in the world. We need to know what makes us, us.

We identify ourselves with our name, hair color, where we come from, what we do.

But, we don’t stop there. The story of who we are gets enriched every day. “I am a Manchester United fan,” “I love Opera music,” “I am a wine lover,” and so on.

If you have neglected your well-being for many years, it is likely that your self-image in midlife can be a hurdle.

I have struggled much more than I should have at the beginning of my efforts. Quitting smoking, eating healthier and start exercising was very difficult.

The main reason was that my self-image was the one of a smoker, junk food lover and not being a gym guy. It is true that those were my habits, the things I was doing, but not who I was.

The trap I had fallen into was to associate what I was doing with who I was. And even if that is true -that we become what we do, then the solution is to change what we do.

The tipping point for me was when I stopped identifying myself with my old habits.

Although I was a smoker most of my life, I was not, of course, a smoker as a kid. I was not eating junk food when I was living with my parents. I was very active and into sports as a teenager.

I realised that we can consciously choose our identities. And I decided to chose the ones that served my health and well being better.

And what about you? What is the story you are telling yourself? Do the identities you developed over the years serve your wellbeing?

Conclusion

Establishing a sustainable well-being routine in midlife is not easy. Modern lifestyle and busyness make it even harder.

If we want to be successful, we need to make it simpler by avoiding some common pitfalls.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle should become our default mode and not a precise measure at a point in time.

It should not be a competition or a race that creates stress.

Establishing a supportive environment is essential to succeed in any of our efforts.

We should be able to view ourselves as healthy and vibrant without getting stuck in the rut with our old, bad habits.