Why Skills Are Key to Achieving Better Health

If you use social media, you've no doubt seen a post suggesting that better sleep, nutrition, and exercise will significantly improve your well-being. While this is true, it's not particularly helpful advice because achieving these goals is much easier said than done. In fact, without a skills practice, many people start with the best intentions but quickly become discouraged when they struggle to maintain these habits, often feeling shame for having failed. There's a better way, and that's the advice in this post.

A Skills-First Approach

To achieve better sleep, nutrition, and exercise, you need to start with skills. At TheraHive, this means using Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills, which are optimized to help you change your behaviors.

You can think of this process in three stages:

1. Stage 1: Use skills to start developing better habits around sleep, nutrition, and exercise.
2. Stage 2: Establish a baseline improvement in these areas, providing you with more energy, resilience, and confidence from achieving these goals. However, this stage doesn't necessarily address the underlying behaviors associated with your mental health issues.
3. Stage 3: With this new baseline, improved confidence, energy, and resilience, use skills to address the underlying behavioral patterns contributing to your mental health issues, whether that's anxiety, depression, rumination, impulsivity, emotion regulation, or anything else.

Start Small and Build Momentum

Let’s explore how to take on one of the basics. You can't just flip a switch and go from not exercising to having a full exercise routine; that approach often leads to failure. A skillful approach leverages the concept of shaping in psychology, where you gradually shift towards the desired behavior.

Rather than aiming to go from no exercise to a full workout routine, begin with small, manageable steps. For example, start with just a few minutes of exercise each day. Over time, as you build consistency and confidence, gradually increase the intensity and duration of your workouts.

Skills as Building Blocks for Change

By focusing on skills first, you're setting yourself up for long-term success. These skills are the building blocks that enable sustainable changes. They help you create new habits and gradually adjust your behavior in a manageable and less overwhelming way.

Skills acquisition leads to skill building, behavioral changes build upon other behavioral changes, and successes build upon successes. When you see that you can make a small behavioral change, it's easier to stack another small change on top. Soon, these small changes add up to profound transformations in your life.

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Enhancing Resilience and Energy

While improving your nutrition, sleep, and exercise will undoubtedly make you feel better and provide more energy and resilience, it's essential to remember that these changes alone won't solve underlying ineffective behavioral patterns. Feeling better physically puts you in a stronger position to tackle these patterns, but actual facilitation of behavioral change relies on the skills you've developed.

These skills help you make gradual, sustainable changes, building the foundation for long-term success and improved health.

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