Is exercise your keystone habit?

[soul food]

http://observer.com/2016/06/this-is-how ... -research/

This Is How To Make Good Habits Stick: 6 Secrets From Research

By Eric Barker • 06/17/16 1:15pm

1) Start With “Keystone Habits”

Exercising isn’t just good for you. It’s also a “keystone habit.” It’s a good change that often triggers other good changes, passively.

When I spoke to Charles Duhigg, author of the excellent book “The Power of Habit“, he explained that exercise leads people to unknowingly create other, often unrelated, good habits.

It makes you eat better. And helps you use your credit card less. And makes you more productive at work. Here’s Charles:

There’s this fundamental finding in science that some habits seem to matter more than others. When researchers look at how people change their habitual behaviors, they find when some changes occur, it seems to set off a chain reaction that causes other patterns to change as well. For some people, exercise is a good example of this. When you start exercising habitually, according to studies, you start eating more healthfully. That makes sense. You start feeling good about your body. For many people, when they start exercising, they stop using their credit cards quite so often. They procrastinate less at work. They do their dishes earlier in the day. It seems to be evidence that for many people, exercise is a keystone habit. Once you start to change your exercise habits, it sets off a chain reaction that changes other habits as well.

So maybe you already exercise. Or perhaps committing to the gym seems too daunting right now. What are other keystone habits? What alchemy do they all have in common?

Keystone habits change how you see yourself. And that’s what causes the cascade of positive change. Here’s Charles:

The power of a keystone habit draws from its ability to change your self image. Basically, anything can become a keystone habit if it has this power to make you see yourself in a different way.

So start with a habit that makes you see yourself as the kind of person you want to be.

[soul food]

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/ho ... e-gym.html

How Exercise Shapes You, Far Beyond the Gym

By Bradley Stulberg

A study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology found that college students who went from not exercising at all to even a modest program (just two to three gym visits per week) reported a decrease in stress, smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption, an increase in healthy eating and maintenance of household chores, and better spending and study habits. In addition to these real-life improvements, after two months of regular exercise, the students also performed better on laboratory tests of self-control. This led the researchers to speculate that exercise had a powerful impact on the students’ “capacity for self-regulation.” In laypeople’s terms, pushing through the discomfort associated with exercise — saying “yes” when their bodies and minds were telling them to say “no” — taught the students to stay cool, calm, and collected in the face of difficulty, whether that meant better managing stress, drinking less, or studying more.

For this reason, the author Charles Duhigg, in his 2012 bestseller The Power of Habit, calls exercise a “keystone habit,” or a change in one area life that brings about positive effects in other areas. Duhigg says keystone habits are powerful because “they change our sense of self and our sense of what is possible.” This explains why the charity Back on My Feet uses running to help individuals who are experiencing homelessness improve their situations. Since launching in 2009, Back on My Feet has had over 5,500 runners, 40 percent of whom have gained employment after starting to run with the group and 25 percent of whom have found permanent housing. This is also likely why it’s so common to hear about people who started training for a marathon to help them get over a divorce or even the death of a loved one.

[petero]

This is a good way to think of it. I think drinking is my keystone habit.

A lot of other things have to be in place for me to do the outdoor activities I like to do, and diet is definitely one of them.

[Yomom]

Toothbrushing is my Keystone Habit.

[soul food]

petero, Ha! Didn't there used to be a beer called Keystone? There are keystone animals and plants. Salmon is one for the NW. I remember reading how it contributed to fertility of soil and food for bears, salmon berry bushes.

I am thinking exercise is my keystone habit and I keep prioritizing everything else above it so I never get the cascade effect going. I never keep it up regularly. I have periods where I do it. It feels like a real sacrifice (it's like I am saying no to other important things) to submit to the time it takes and the tediousness of it. I can do so many other tedious things, why not that? I have one big project and I think that if I can get it accomplished then I will have time to do these other things. I am thinking I need to switch it up. I need to say to myself, If I don't exercise I will never get my project accomplished.

Diet might be the most important but exercise might be the keystone habit, the one with the power to change self image.

The power of a keystone habit draws from its ability to change your self image. Basically, anything can become a keystone habit if it has this power to make you see yourself in a different way.

Interesting, Yomon. What is the cascade effect of tooth brushing for you?

soul food

[petero]

Didn't there used to be a beer called Keystone?

LOL I didn't think of that, but there is!