You don’t need to hit rock bottom to change things

I’ve been reflecting lately on how something doesn’t need to be completely destroying our lives, in order for us to want to change it.

This initially came to mind when reading Shahroo Izadi’s latest book, “How Diets Make Us Fat”*. I know Shahroo personally, and she’s a brilliant and captivating speaker in the space of behaviour change. In her book, she speaks in such a compelling way about her own personal experience with diets and struggling to change her habits. She talks about behaviours like using appetite suppressants, extremely restrictive diets, and even gastric surgery and experiences of bulimia. She also talks about her enormous feelings of shame, worthlessness, and that her body wasn’t worth looking after at all when she was fat. My heart broke for her - and I so admire that she’s able to share these difficult experiences, in order to help others. 

In comparison, my own experiences with diet culture and weight loss seem to barely register on the scale. Yes, I cycled through somewhat restrictive diets, and lost then regained weight. Yes, I experienced a huge amount of food noise and obsessed sometimes over food and how I looked. And yes, I definitely had some negative feelings about myself and my behaviour, and I held a lot of internalised fatphobia.

But it definitely wasn’t anywhere near as severe as Shahroo’s experience. Does that mean that I should’ve carried on as I was, and not made changes? Absolutely not. But I can understand how someone at the beginning of their change journey might be left feeling like they’re “not severe enough to need to change”.

When things don’t feel bad enough

I was reminded of this again when I saw this post from @mrs_midlife_ on taking a break from alcohol over the bank holiday weekend. Not because she had issues with problematic behaviour or related health problems - but because she’s noticing the impacts, and felt a little break would help.

This felt so refreshing. So often when people post about quitting alcohol, or cutting down, they talk about blackouts in memory, or really embarrassing behaviour, or having a health wake-up call. And I always think “well that’s not me, so I don’t need to cut down”. But it doesn’t have to be about that - even if something is a little off, it can be worth addressing.

So why does this happen - and how can we move away from it?

Why we create thresholds for change

What’s going on here isn’t really about motivation, it’s about how we decide whether something is worthy of change at all.

Comparing ourselves to others can reinforce this. Sometimes, comparison can help us to change our behaviour (e.g. if we feel like we’re not “keeping up with the Jones’s”!). However, when we compare ourselves to someone doing worse than us (as in the examples above), it can backfire. Evidence shows that this can help us to feel better (because in comparison, we’re doing great!), but also less motivated (we’re more likely to “coast” - because we’re doing great). 

And once something feels “not serious enough”, we default to staying with the status quo - even if there’s a mild ongoing cost. Carrying on doing the same thing is easier for us, so we tend to default to staying with what we already know unless something interrupts that.

And underneath all of this is that thing I talk about all the time: the “all-or-nothing” way of thinking about change. Either something is seriously bad enough to justify major action, or it isn’t worth changing at all.

All of this creates a hidden threshold for change that doesn’t actually exist in reality. In reality, change sits on a continuum - and “a bit off” is still a valid reason to adjust something.

“Rock-bottom” as a motivator

Often people can feel like they need to be seriously struggling in order to be motivated to change - and it's true that when things feel painful enough, they can push us to act.

But that doesn’t mean crisis is the most useful or necessary starting point for change: it can drive us to make changes because we need to, not necessarily because we want to. As I’ve written about before, motivation works best in the long-term if it’s intrinsic, self-driven, and grounded in things that are personally meaningful. Crisis-driven motivation can get things moving, but there’s a risk that it makes change feel like something we are forced into rather than something we are actively choosing - which may make it harder to sustain over time.

It’s worth making changes even if you’re not doing terribly

So if you notice this pattern in yourself, it can be helpful to reflect on where you’re waiting for something to feel ‘serious enough’ before you give yourself permission to change it.

Instead of asking “is this serious enough to change?”, approach it more softly: what feels slightly off, slightly heavy, or slightly harder than it needs to be? Not in a “what’s wrong with me?” way, more in a noticing sense.

From there, change doesn’t need to mean a big overhaul. It can be small, almost experimental. Tiny adjustments that make things feel a bit more aligned, a bit easier, a bit more you.

If you want a way to build that kind of reflection into your week, my free email series, Gentle Reset, is there to help with exactly that.

And if you’re struggling with your relationship with food or your body: you don’t need to wait until things feel severe, or like they’ve become a clinical problem in order to get support. In fact, working on things earlier (when they feel slightly off rather than completely unmanageable) is often where change is most sustainable. If you’re not sure where to start, my coaching can help.

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*Content warning: this is a great book in so many ways, but it still centres weight loss as the desired outcome. If you’re still working to step away from weight loss and move towards body acceptance, you might want to give it a miss.