The thing about massive positive changes in lifestyle is that they tend to have massive rippling side effects that often get overlooked and aren’t considered.
Let’s say, for example, you hit the gym and have a killer workout—after having been out of it for a while—and plan on keeping everything else in your life essentially the same.
The theory is that this will have a net-positive result and move you in the direction of stronger, healthier, and feeling better.
In reality, however, that intense workout ripples into:
– A proportionally killer appetite and eating way more than you usually do.
– Feeling exhausted from the spike in energy expenditure and unproductive and not present the rest of the day.
– Feeling painfully sore the next day and like you don’t want to move at all… making your reconsider hard workouts and resent the way they make you feel.
Incremental lifestyle change, however, allows you to maintain all other lifestyle variables while positively changing just the one.
…Like doing ten minutes of foam rolling in the morning or taking a walk around the block when you get home from work. These types of changes won’t have massive rippling effects into the other areas of your life and you’ll be able to maintain all that you’ve been doing PLUS add in this constructive action that moves your life in an overall net-positive direction.
A massive positive action that has an overall net-negative result isn’t a positive change at all. The goal—and what we should be focused on when considering lifestyle actions we could take—should always be how can I make this net-positive.