(Originally posted September 13, 2013)

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My nephew Calen loves to play with his action figures. He holds a good guy in one hand and a bad guy in the other hand and he creates fascinating sound effects while he slams them into each other in a war of almost-equals:

PSHEW! FFFZZZZ! Yaaaah!! POW! Bang! BOOM!

And at the end he always announces the winner: “X guy versus Y guy: Y guy wins!” And then he finds another pair to duke it out.

And so must we sometimes duke it out with funks. Call it a funk, call it a downward spiral…we’ve all probably been there at some point.

Maybe you’ve been eating poorly, which drags your energy down,

so then you don’t want to exercise, which drags your energy down,

and then you sleep way too much, which drags your energy down,

and then you need to eat more sugar and drink more coffee to artificially boost your lack of energy.

Then you notice your clothes not fitting right and you feel bloated,

so you console yourself with more sugar/salt/carbs/coffee

…and on it goes until something stops the cycle.

The rabbit hole…it’s so deep and so dark! What could possibly stop the momentum of the downward spiral?!

Would you believe me if I said it could be as easy as successfully implementing one new habit?

I know, it sounds like crazy talk…and it absolutely works! For just over a month now I’ve been walking my dogs every morning around the huge park in my neighborhood. It takes between 45 minutes and an hour to walk the entire park.

At first it seemed like it took a lot of energy to do the walk.

After only a couple of weeks, I started noticing that the walks were boosting my energy–right away and throughout the rest of the day.

By re-acclimating my body to movement, I found that I then desired to move more during the rest of the day.

I also noticed a marked improvement in the nutritional quality of my meals

and I started drinking way more water than I had been (because I was once again noticing my thirst signals).

And so…with the addition of ONE NEW HABIT to my day, I was able to reverse the downward spiral!!

If you don’t believe it, try it yourself. You could create the habit of only going to bed once the kitchen is clean…or once you’ve finished your blog post for the night. Maybe it’s that you eat one salad every day as part of your lunch, or you begin each day with a nutritious smoothie. Maybe it’s simply that you make your bed in the morning upon rising.

Maybe your bedroom is a disaster because you leave clothes lying everywhere after having a hard time making a fashion choice for the day…So perhaps you could make it a habit to only go to bed after you’ve put all the clothes away.

Here’s the key: Don’t bite off more than you can chew! Don’t set yourself up for failure by trying to change everything in your life all at once. Start with one new habit and watch how the dominoes will begin to fall…

Downward Spiral Versus New Habit: NEW HABIT WINS!!