Dr. Therese: One of my favorite phrases that I say all the time is laughably small steps. Laughably. Laughably small.
Kyle: So good. You’ve told me that before. That is so good. Laughably, small steps. That’s exactly what it is. You don’t have to go on the Mediterranean diet tomorrow, but maybe just cut down on how many Cokes you’re having, if that’s your goal, you know?
Dr. Therese: Yeah. Or One of my favorite pieces to behavior change is about what we can do more of instead of less of. So with the Mediterranean diet, okay, can you have more olive oil in your diet instead of all those vegetable processed fats or whatever?
Adding is usually easier than subtracting. But yeah, this is the thing. We have gotten so extreme with our behavior change and we’ve taken the fun all out of it. And one of the things that I think about is when babies are learning, they’re learning at this exponential rate compared to us as adults.
How do they learn? They learn by playing. They learn because it’s fun and it’s just interacting with their environment in these ways that come very naturally. One of the things that I think we do wrong is we take the fun out of everything. When it comes to behavior change, we make ourselves miserable instead of making it fun.
And I loved the example you gave about kind of movement and working out, because I completely relate to it.
One of the ways I’ve been healing my mindset in this space is to lean into the fun of movement instead of to focus on body modification, changing, getting thinner, any of those things because it makes it not fun.
And one thing we know is that when we are stressed and overwhelmed about something, that amygdala, that fear center in our brain is activated…shutting down all of the processes that can help us learn and grow and achieve and do all the good things we need to do.
So we want to avoid our amygdala being activated when we’re trying to take on new behaviors, when we’re trying to practice self-care. We want to run away from anything that’s too intimidating.
And when we do it small, when we do small changes, then it paves the way for doing more. So yeah, I remember that working out, the idea of it freaked me out. And then I decided to do some fun Pilates class with a friend and had such a great time that I was like I can do this again.
And I can do this by myself and I can do this more regularly and I can invest in this and I can buy the Pilates socks now. And you kind of get yourself on a trajectory of that self-care and change, but it’s not gonna be as effective most of the time if you are intimidating yourself to death so that you just never wanna set foot in a gym.
So yeah, laughably small steps, that’s the secret.
