5 Tips in 5 Minutes: How to Create Healthy, Sustainable Habits

In this episode of Healthspan Digest, host Aaron Shaw shares five actionable tips to help you create healthy, sustainable habits that stick. In just five minutes, you'll learn how to build micro habits, stack them for maximum efficiency, use visual cues to stay on track, celebrate small wins the right way, and adopt an identity that aligns with your health goals. Whether you're just getting started or looking to solidify your routine, these tips will guide you toward living a vibrant, healthy life. Ready to make change simple? Hit play and take the first step today!

This episode is perfect for those striving for longevity and healthspan improvement.

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Transcript

Five tips in five minutes. Today we're talking about creating healthy, sustainable habits. How do you create healthy habits that are sustainable over the long term so you reap all of the benefits?

That's what we're talking about today. Five tips. Welcome to HealthSpan Digest. My name is Aaron Shaw. am a lover of all things, health, fitness, rehab, performance. I have nearly three decades of experience and I practice as an occupational therapist, a hand therapist, a strength coach. I'm still a competitive athlete and I'm a coach. So I work with people who want to extend their healthspan and really live the most vibrant, healthy life that they can.

It's easy for me to get long winded about healthspan. love all things health and fitness related, but today I'm going to break down five tips in five minutes. Don't start your clock just yet, but I do have my timer out here to make sure that I stay honest with my time. So once I get started, I'm going to give you five tips in five minutes. And the focus is on sustainable habits. This is the one of the biggest challenges I think we have is not just.

knowing the right things to do perhaps for our health, but how do we integrate these into our life where it is just a habit, it is just automatic, it's just like brushing your teeth. Super simple, just happens.

The first question we have to answer is what is healthspan? Well, healthspan is the length of time within our lifespan that we are healthy, active, vibrant, and free of disease, ideally free of diseases that we have control over, like preventable diseases that we should be controlling to live a long, vibrant life. With healthspan, I focus on five pillars, which are exercise, sleep, nutrition, emotional wellbeing, and preventative care. And today,

No matter what those pillars are, we need to recognize that having the habit, the lifestyle, being the person that engages with intention to address those pillars of healthspan is incredibly important. So just knowing what the things are isn't good enough. We all know we should probably eat better and sleep better and, you know, take care of our stress better, but how do we create habits? So this is easy. How do we do it? So it's just easy and we can live the life that we want.

So here are five concise actionable tips, focus on sustainable habit formation for your health. And I'm going to start the timer now. Number one, start small and build up. So focus on creating micro habits. And I mean like tiny, tiny habits as simple as going to bed 10 minutes earlier and waking up 10 minutes earlier. So you can have a little bit more of a morning routine and that could be a brisk walk, for example.

tiny habits. People try to take on too much too soon and end up off the rail. So simple habits. You want to lose weight? Start off the habit of using smaller plates when you eat. If you want to be stronger, start with a habit of doing a plank for 60 seconds after you brush your teeth. Cause it's a habit. You can do it as simple as just, it's a small thing before you think about going to the gym and starting a massive overhaul of a routine. So

Step one, first tip, focus on forming micro habits. Start small. Second tip, stack your habits. So really the key with this is attaching a new habit to an existing one. So I mentioned brushing your teeth. So I assume that brushing your teeth is probably a habit. You do it automatically in the morning. You do it automatically in the evening. It just happens. Well, great. Take that, like piggyback on that.

and do something in relation to that, something at that same time. So that could be doing 20 air squats right after you brush your teeth. It could be doing a one minute plank while your coffee is brewing in the morning. If you brew coffee every morning, if that's the habit, if that's already something that happens, add a little thing on top of that, stack another habit on top of that. Another example would be if you walk your dog every morning. Great, if that's a habit, that's great. It's a beautiful thing to do. Walking is great.

Awesome evidence that has super benefits, but once you add in 20 jumping jacks when you're done, you're adding a little habit, a healthy based habit on top of a habit that you already have. You're stacking habits. Super helpful. Tip number three, use visual cues. So leave your workout gear or a water bottle in a visible place. as soon as you wake up in the morning, you click on the light and you think, what am I going to do? What's going on? Before your brain has a chance to even turn on.

I want your eyes to see your workout clothes or see a water bottle or some sort of visual cue that's going to tell your brain. This is the next thing. This is part of what we do for me. I still, you know, I go to the gym a couple of days a week. My water bottles already set out by gym clothes already set out the night before. Our water bottle has an electrolyte in it. has creatine in it. So I don't forget those it's automatic and it's automatic in part and effortless.

because the visual cues are already there. My brain doesn't even have to think. It takes no effort whatsoever, but it's because I can just scan my environment and my brain just follows that the activity just follows with literally no effort.

Tip number four, celebrate small wins. It is okay to celebrate once you start sticking to a habit for a while. But the first, the really the main tip I want to say with this is people tend to want to celebrate big time for tiny little efforts. And I think you need to have a little bit of restraint or more than a little bit, a moderate, at least amount of restraint before you start celebrating too soon. You have to earn it. So no.

You're not going to get ice cream dessert because you exercise twice this week. You didn't deserve it. You haven't earned it. Splurge on a new workout outfit, perhaps, after you do a month of consistent, healthy eating of whole nutritious foods. Delay that gratification a little bit, but definitely celebrate it. Put that little treat out a month away, the little celebration a month away after you've really started to establish a healthy routine. So yes, reward yourself, but be cautious not to

overindulge too soon before you really been able to reap the benefits of the effort that you've been putting in. Tip number five, focus on your identity, not just the goals. And this is really a mindset shift to think I want to be, or I am someone who values my health. Just, I mean, literally, I want you to say this out loud right now if you're not already, but I am somebody who values my health and I am an athlete and this can be at any age. I'm not talking, you don't have to be a competitive athlete, but an active and active

lifestyle type of person is an athlete in my mind. So say it, change your identity. And this doesn't have to take long. You can do it literally this second. You can decide this exact second from here forward. I am an athlete. Hard stop. It is that simple. You don't have to overcomplicate it. You just have to decide right now that you're going to own that identity. And then from here forward, from this second forward, you act like it, you make decisions like it. I'm not going to say this is easy, but it is simple.

And it's as simple as flipping a switch and saying today I am an athlete and live like it. And that my friends is five minutes on the dot. So five tips and five minutes, those are all about creating sustainable, healthy habits and do not underestimate the value. quite the opposite. would say double down, triple down on developing habits that over time are both sustainable, but have a huge impact.

It doesn't need to be complicated. Start small, identify yourself as an athletic person, as a healthy person, start living that life, making tiny, tiny changes, and it will make a difference. Share this episode with somebody you think really struggles with having sustainable, healthy habits, somebody you love, family member. feel free to message me if you want help setting up a sustainable routine, sustainable, healthy habits for yourself. And until next time, cheers.