CONSISTENCY VERSUS INTENSITY IN ACHIEVING LIFE GOALS

CONSISTENCY VS. INTENSITY

I was listening to a podcast today where the person being interviewed brought up the idea of considering consistency versus intensity as it relates to health and wellness goals. I had never really thought about the relationship between the two before, but it made so much sense to me. The more I thought about it, the more I thought of examples of how this applies to so many areas of our lives that we may be trying to improve or make changes to.

RELATIONSHIP

If you think about it you can probably think of many examples that demonstrate the adverse relationship between intensity and consistency. The more intense you are in the activity you are pursuing, the less likely you will be consistent in that activity. This is why when we try to make drastic life changes we often don’t stick to them. They are too intense of a change. We are trying to push ourselves too hard, so instead of making improvements, we end up staying the same. Instead of doing something to get us closer to where we want to be we go really hard for a short period of time and then quit. So, while we might think we are doing good by pushing ourselves hard, we would have been better off by going less intense and making a change that we can stick with.

INTENSITY VARIES BY PERSON

When trying to make changes in our lives, we have to remember to consider our personal situation and what would be considered intense for us. This is similar to how when we set goals, we want to make sure they are realistic to our current life situation. For example, I plan my meals for every night of the week.  If I had a goal to make a change which would include making sure each week my meal plan included trying out 1 new recipe, that would not really be too much of an intense change. It would be a little bit of a push, but it would not be a dramatic change to what I am already doing.

However, if you currently never meal plan and you decide that going forward you will start meal planning for every day of the week and also make sure that you include 1 new recipe per week in your meal plan, that would be pretty intense. It does not mean that you could not have that as a long-term goal. But, it does mean that you would want to start with a change that for your lifestyle was not so intense. Maybe you would start by planning two meals per week using recipes that you are already familiar with. So, what is a small change for one person, can be an intense change for another. It all depends on where you are currently at.

DOWNFALLS OF HIGH INTENSITY

Many of us have experienced New Year’s Resolutions that get completely forgotten about, often by mid-January. The reason that we often fail at New Year’s Resolutions is that they often center around goals that are too intense for our current lifestyle. This is why gyms are often jam-packed during the first few weeks of the New Year and then the crowd starts to dwindle. It’s not that those people did not have good intentions, they most likely were trying to make changes that were too intense. If you have not been working out in years, it might be a bit much to set a goal to work out at a gym 5 days a week. Maybe trying to get there 1 or 2 times a week, might be a little more realistic to start.

We can get ourselves really excited about making improvements and expect ourselves to make drastic changes to our lives and stick with them. Some of us might have the stamina and motivation to stick with drastic changes like that. But, for most of us, we will be much more likely to stick with something long-term if the intensity of the change is much lower. Not that you don’t want to push yourself some, but pushing too hard it will make it difficult to stick with the changes and you will likely burn out.

CONSISTENCY IS KEY

When trying to make changes to any area of your life, whether that be your health, finances, housekeeping, or whatever, really think about how you can make changes that you will be consistent with. Patience is needed to make changes to your life. Change usually only sticks when it is done with less intensity. So, that makes change come slowly. It is important to remind ourselves that by making small changes that we can continue to do on a consistent basis we are in a much better place than making intense changes that end up getting put on hold and then eventually forgotten about.

So, when you are trying to make a change in your life, think about making changes in a way that you can be pretty confident you will be consistent with. It can be fun to think of these drastic changes and say from now on I am going to do whatever the unreasonable thing is! But, if we want to have long-term success, it is important to come back to reality and make sure that whatever changes we are making will be able to be done consistently.

MAKE SMALL CHANGES

So, this is really just another example of how small changes can get us a lot closer to where we want to be than trying to make drastic changes in our lives. While you need to be patient, just remind yourself that you are making progress. Like always progress is better than perfection.

When we wait until we get to the point that we can do it perfectly we have wasted a lot of time that we would have been making continuous progress. And it is also very likely that we will never get to the point where we can do something 100% perfectly, so in that case, we end up getting nowhere. So, be sure to acknowledge yourself for those small changes you make in your life that help get you where you want to be. They will end up getting you big changes in the long run because they are not so intense that you cannot maintain them!

Thanks so much for checking in! If you would like to hear the podcast version of this topic check out Lola’s Frugal Life Podcast! Also, be sure to check out my other blog posts on this site!

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