You can stop struggling to make changes.

If you have seen my Facebook page, you know that I love my essential oils. I have incorporated them into all parts of my life. Using essential oils for the health benefits is how I first got started with my oils. For me essential oils provided me with a support rope to hold on to while I was making the necessary changes that needed to be made.  

I love the saying, “Weed the garden so the flowers can grow.” When it comes to essential oils they do not weed our garden for us, but rather they soften the soil so that we can pull out the weeds, root and all. Now to be clear essential oils are amazing gardening tools, but what I am talking about here are the weeds in our thoughts and habits.

With many failed attempts at changing my habits or even creating new ones. I came to finding myself asking the question, what should I work on first?

This question had been stumping me for a while until I picked up this book called Zen Habits by Leo Babauta. Let’s face it there are lots of things we want to change about our lives, like exercise more, eat less junk food, cut out sugar, stop playing on our smart phones, complete a triathlon, the list can go on and on. If we attempted to do all of these at the same time we would go mad.

This is a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants help creating good habits and eliminating the bad ones. From this book I learned that we fail at making permanent changes because we have not mastered the art of making small changes, then turning them into habits. We are so obsessed with seeing big changes fast that we push ourselves beyond our limits. This makes us feel stressed and overwhelmed, so we give up, we quit.  

Creating habits makes it so that we won’t have to think about what we need to do, we just do it. An example of this is breathing, if we had to always tell ourselves to breath that is all we would be able to do. Another example of this would be driving to and from work. Have you have found yourself wondering how you got there? Once something becomes a habit we just do it without having to think about it. Wouldn’t it be great to get up in the morning go to the gym and do your workout automatically?

The key to start creating a successful change is to start with the easiest positive habits that we can create. Like taking our vitamins daily or drinking a glass of water every morning or applying our morning essential oils. Become good at creating good habits. Once you have created a habit slowly add to it.  This method is often used when people are training for a marathon. They don’t start out by running a full marathon, they work up to it. This holds true when we are working on creating habits. Start with the easy things first get them to become automatic then add to it. Instead of completely changing your diet, start by adding a vegetable with dinner every night, then lunch and dinner, then breakfast, lunch and dinner. It needs to be easy and not stressful for you habit change to successful.

“Start with the learning how to create a habit before you attempt breaking a bad one!” ~Jessica Hoffmann-Nay

I am loyal Pepsi Drinker. I have been for the past 20 years and I am only 35. Kicking this bad habit to the curb would be the best move I could make towards my making the positive changes I want in my life. It would help me lose weight, help me balance my blood sugar which will help me with my sugar cravings, which will help me balance my hormones and manage my moods, and so on. It seems only logical that I should start with changing this habit first. So why don’t I? Because all my attempts in the past have ended in failure, so I am going try something different. I am going work on creating good habits, like taking my daily vitamins and drinking water before I attempt to eliminate this bad habit. I’ll let you know how it goes.  As I am finishing up this post I just wanted to leave you with one last quote that I am sure you have heard before, but it is so true.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always got, so it you want what you’ve never had you have to do what you’ve never done.” ~ Megan Miller