Ep154 Transcript: Identifying the Roadblocks Keeping You from Making a Big Change – Quick Fix Friday

Andrea Vahl: Do you want to make a big change, but aren’t sure why you haven’t been able to break a habit yet? In today’s episode of Quick Fix Friday, I’ll talk about three areas to examine that might be preventing you from making a big change in your habits.

Intro: Hello, dreamers. Welcome to the late starters club, giving you the inspiration, mindset, and tools you need to start something midlife and beyond remember, it’s never too late to follow your dreams.

Andrea Vahl: In episode 152, I talked to my friend, Jolene Park, and she stopped drinking in her forties for good. She then went on to found her gray area drinkers website that has a ton of great resources on how she stopped drinking and ways to think about and reframe the drinking habit.

But I think this also can apply to different types of habits that we might have. So one of the things that Jolene talked about in the episode was the physiological issues with drinking. And that comes down to things like the dopamine hit, the addictive substance that alcohol is, and really diving deeper into those issues.

Those might be issues for you with any type of habit. There might be some sort of dopamine hit that you’re getting if you are overeating or if you’re doing an activity that you really enjoy. And of course, sometimes those bad habits are fun and that’s why it’s very hard to break them.

Another issue that might be preventing you from breaking a habit is the social situation that you find yourself in and why you keep doing that particular activity. So for drinking, for example, we’ll just keep using that as an example. You might have friends that go out for happy hours or they might be really into having big parties. Making sure everyone is drinking enough. And that might be a difficult situation for you if you are trying to break that habit.

The other issue with drinking is that it is a very social activity. It’s everywhere in our society. A lot of activities are based around drinking or have drinking as a little side action piece of what you’re doing there. So you might have to get out of a different social situation that is keeping you in a particular habit.

Now, that might not necessarily mean you’ve got to find new friends, but in some cases that’s possible if they’re not supporting you in a new habit.

The third area that you might need to examine for any habit that you have is the mental piece of it. Is this something you really deep down want to do? You have to be able to commit to that new habit and make that change and really dig deep into your why behind breaking that habit.

There can be a lot of triggers that come up around patterns that you might have, for example, with drinking after a long day, you might think, Hey, I worked hard. I deserve this. And you might need to examine that as well.

There’s a lot of times there’s a knee jerk reaction to just saying, Oh I’ll just keep going today and I’ll start tomorrow.

So Jolene has a ton of great resources on her blog that I will link to to get you to reframe thinking about drinking, but also just thinking about any habit. I think because all of these things come into play, and it’s going to take a big shift to really make that habit stick. So one of the things that Jolene did was get an app on her phone that helped her mark an X for every day she did not drink.

And that could be the same for any type of habit you want to break. I have habits that I want to start that I’ve talked about before with a app called habit. And I just make a little mark on the day that I do that activity.

So hope that was helpful and definitely check out Jolene’s blog. I’ll also link to a couple other resources that I have loved when thinking about habits.

Outro: Hope that was helpful and make sure you grab the free guide top tools for late starters on the website at late starters club. com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.