Maintaining Healthy Habits, Requires Maintaining Up to Date Goals.

Something strange can happen when we reach a specific running goal time or goal distance. We find that we start to lose our healthy habit of going running. This is an ironic detail about Sports Psychology. A detail that’s important to learn about, if we want to Maintain Healthy Lifelong Habits.

One thing that happens when we reach for a specific time or distance goal, is that we get in the specific habit of reaching for that specific goal. 

So our habit isn’t just to;   ‘go run’,   It’s to;   ‘go work on our specific running goals.’ 

Then when we reach the goal, the running habit loses its exact purpose. Sometimes weeks after reaching a goal we realize we haven’t been running much. “Wait, What happened, I thought that I had a good resilient habit of ‘go run.’ Why don’t I Feel Motivated?” 

It can be difficult to see that the real habit was; ‘go work on our specific running goals.’ It can be difficult to see that we’ve lost the goal by reaching it. That we don’t actually have a goal Now. We’ve lost having a desired destination. And by losing having a desired destination, we’ve lost our ability to choose a path to get there. We don’t realize that we’re lost because we were so comfortable knowing our goals were in order. It became a way of life. but Now it’s time to update things.

Establishing New Helpful Goals should be done soon after we reach our previous goals. Yes, take a couple days to focus on feeling accomplished, to feel pride in what we’ve done. And then; Establish New Goals to Focus On. Give ourselves the specific motivation needed to strengthen our healthy habits. Let’s not get thrown off by this strange detail of sports psychology, let’s just keep our goals up to date instead. Let’s keep our healthy habits that we’ve worked to establish.