One of the most important things that we can do as movement coaches is to be better at helping people change habits. I know that sounds kind of weird because if you’re a movement professional, everyone wants you to be awesome at biomechanics and neurology and all this crazy stuff, which is amazing and incredibly important.
But if you can’t get people to do stuff when they’re not in front of you, all of your knowledge often goes to waste. So one of the things that we teach in our 9S: Sustenance course, which is a nutrition course that is about 80% on habit change and behavior change, we talk about a technique that’s been around for many, many years in the therapeutic realm, it’s called habit linking.
And this is a really, really simple idea in your head. You link together two things, and one of them is something you do all the time. So I’m gonna tell you today how to improve your breathing when you’re doing the dishes in our household.
My, one of my daily agreed upon task is stay away from cooking anything, alright? No one wants that. Alright? You don’t want me to cook anything, but you know what? I clean really, really well, and I actually kinda like it, so I do the dishes. Now for me, I’m also a breathing fanatic. I teach this stuff all the time, but in my busy schedule between emails and work and everything, sometimes I don’t have a dedicated 10 or 20 or 30 minute spot to do meditation and breathing and frankly, in many cases, I don’t want to, because I have other stuff I wanna be doing. So I use this idea of habit linking.
So my general approach is every time I do the dishes, I’m going to practice my breathing. Now in the cognitive training world this would be considered a dual tasking event because what I’m doing is I’ve got the water on, I’m loading the dishwasher, and I’m scrubbing pans, whatever that is.
That is a task. There’s a lot of different things I’m doing. I’m walking, I’m moving, I’m turning, I’m looking around, I’m performing motor activity. But I then challenge myself and I literally try to do this every single day to use a different breathing technique. For instance, maybe today, I don’t know yet, ’cause I haven’t done the dishes yet, but maybe today what I’m gonna do is a 6, 7, 8 breathing pattern.
What that requires of me is to go, okay, I’m gonna make this choice. I’m gonna inhale for six seconds. I’m gonna hold for seven seconds and I’m gonna exhale for eight seconds the entire time I’m working in the kitchen. When I do this, ’cause I’ve done it so often, I rarely will set a timer, but you can do that.
Grab your iPad, grab your phone, whatever. Set a stopwatch so that you can glance at it and let it do the timing for you, or you count in your head all of a sudden, what is a typically mundane task, somewhat mindless. Becomes a way to make your brain better at one of the most critical things that we can do, which is move and think at the same time.
And then there’s the added benefit of doing good breathing work in the midst of it. This is one of the things I’ve taught for many years, and a lot of people, believe it or not, will go, this is one of the most helpful things that they’ve learned to do because maybe it’s not doing the dishes, maybe it’s every time they sit down and check email, they start doing a breathing pattern. Whatever we have found to be effective for them, they just start layering it into something that they do every single day. And all of a sudden you feel like you’re more efficient, and more importantly, your brain and body are getting healthier while you’re also accomplishing another task.
So this is a multi beneficial approach. I’m breathing better, I’m doing cognitive dual tasking, and all of this is tied into something that I’m already doing. So I’m linking it to a habit which makes the behavior change aspect, way easier than going, I need to pull out my calendar and every single day block out 10 to 12 minutes to do breathing.
I’ve tried that with thousands of people over the years, and very few of them will actually follow through on it for very long. But whenever we can link it to something you do all the time. It’s much more successful. So I would encourage you to give this a shot, try it with your clients. It’s incredibly powerful.
If you are new to our channel, you’re new to Z-Health. We are a brain-based education company. We’ve worked with doctors, coaches, and therapists from all over the world. I think we’re in about 116 countries now over 12,000 students, and our job isn’t to change what you do, it’s to hopefully show you ways to bring brain-based training into what you do to make it even more effective for the people that trust you with their health and their movement.
All right, so if this is interest to you, make sure to subscribe to the channel, check out our free resources, and we’ll see you soon.
