Leave your old habits behind when you move house
A fresh start is obviously on the cards when you are moving home. However, there is evidence to suggest that moving house can really be the catalyst of change in your life, right down to some of your most stubborn habits. We all know the resignation not keeping up our new year’s resolutions or meeting our own targets. Settling back on the sofa for another episode of Netflix rather than stepping up in your own schedule. Did you tell yourself you’d only have four glasses of wine a week? Or perhaps you swore blind you’d finish writing that novel, converting that loft space or reducing your energy consumption. Help is at hand. Research published earlier this year indicates that ingrained habits are easier to break during the first three months after moving house. The clean-slate effect of moving gives you a unique window of opportunity for change. Researchers at the University of Bath found that habits are reinforced when the things around us stay the same. Conversely, when they change, our habit-breaking efforts get emboldened and are more likely to succeed. It’s called the ‘discontinuity effect’.
Moving house cleans the slate
800 people were involved in the research, half of whom had recently moved home. Some of them were taken on an intervention programme, encouraging new, healthier behaviors. It became apparent that the intervention was working by far the most successfully on participants who’d just moved house.
This research which was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology earlier this year suggests that making changes around you gives you a better chance of making changes within.
Research author, Professor Bas Verplanken, was quoted in Bath University News, as saying, “Life transitions present a real opportunity to influence the choices people make. Often, around the time of a major change, life can be up in the air and as such we know that people are generally more open to new ideas and information. However, we now know the window for this is limited – probably to a maximum of three months.
Substituting bad habits with good ones
Bad habits are often couched within our familiar lifestyle choices and so the cues which enable them have to be eliminated, particularly if we are struggling with a difficult vice. As the new location does not have the same cues for the habit it is easier to uproot them and divert the energy that usually is spent in that pattern in a new direction. As humans are action orientated beings, we respond better by replacing a bad habit with a good one, rather than focusing only on eliminating the problem. Setting up new beneficial habits takes time and dedication. A 2010 study in The European Journal of Social Psychology found it took an average of 66 days for a behavior to change (though time varied from 18 to 254 days). Considering this, we can assume that the first three months in your new home are crucial to optimizing your new way of living.
Moving House Is Opportunity for change
It is this three-month window where you will have the chance to set up a new template in your home that supports your new growth. Often the stagnation of old patterns and habits can limit our beliefs of what can be accomplished. Moving into a new place is a great platform on which to curate your new goals. We understand this and for us, it is imperative that the transition from your old place to the new one, be smooth.
Camp Hopson have you covered
Camp Hopson, Master Removers of Newbury have the experience and expertise to handle the technical details while you focus on maximizing this unique window of opportunity. With bases in Dorset, Wiltshire, and Berkshire you can contact us for a quote at https://www.camphopsonremovals.co.uk/contact-us/ and we can set up a plan for you. Leaving you to focus on which bad habits you will be finally leaving behind!
