When you have big goals, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
Whether you want to make changes to your lifestyle or achieve a lifelong dream, the thought of how far you have left to go can put you off even trying.
Rather than focusing on the long road ahead, it can help to take your journey one step at a time. By breaking your objectives down into regular, smaller milestones, you can make your goals feel less overwhelming.
Read on to learn how this “marginal gains” approach could empower you to make steady, continuous progress in improving your wellbeing.
What are “marginal gains”?
In 2003, cycling coach Dave Brailsford used his “aggregation of marginal gains” philosophy to transform the Great British cycling team.
His strategy was fairly simple: improve everything by 1% at a time, from redesigning bike seats to finding the right pillows to improve riders’ sleep quality. These enhancements combined and compounded to deliver significant performance improvements over time.
In just a few years, they went from being notoriously mediocre to record-breaking Olympic gold medallists. Having won only a single gold medal in the previous 100 years, British cyclists took home 60% of the gold cycling medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In 2012, the team set nine Olympic records and seven world records.
You can apply this philosophy to almost any goal. Making small, regular improvements could add up to a significant evolution and allow you to achieve big things with a series of small tweaks.
“Something” is better than “nothing”
When you adopt an “all or nothing” approach, you might often default to “nothing”. Going all-in and trying to do everything at once can be overwhelming, causing you to shut off from the goal completely.
For example, if you want to exercise more, the thought of going to the gym for an hour a day might be too much. As a result, you may end up doing no exercise at all.
The marginal gains philosophy means accepting that “all” might not be feasible right away, and “something” is better than “nothing”.
In some cases, you might continuously increase your effort to build up towards your goal. The NHS’s “Couch to 5k” is a prime example of this, where you start your exercise off at a low level and gradually increase it until you can run a full 5k.
In others, just a few small changes might be enough, provided they’re sustained over a prolonged period.
3 lifestyle tweaks to enhance your wellbeing
When it comes to boosting your wellbeing, even small changes can have a big impact.
A study published by the Lancet found that tweaking your sleep, diet, and exercise behaviours can deliver significant benefits and even prolong your life. In fact, it suggests that small improvements in these three areas can deliver a greater impact than focusing heavily on just one.
1. Sleep
The University of Sydney found that the least healthy people in the study got five and a half hours of sleep each night. For this cohort, getting just an extra five minutes of sleep each night could help extend their life by a year.
2. Diet
According to the study, those with the lowest average “diet quality score” could also help add an extra year to their life simply by eating an extra half-serving of vegetables a day.
3. Exercise
Finally, just two more minutes of exercise a day could also contribute to a longer life for those with the least healthy lifestyles.
These three changes may be barely noticeable. After all, who’s going to notice you eating one more broccoli spear or going to bed five minutes earlier? But by making all three changes together, you could make a notable difference to your wellbeing and longevity.
What’s more, the study suggests that by continuing to make marginal gains in all three areas, you can form healthy habits that could help add nine years or more to your life.
Start small
If you’re looking to boost your overall health and wellbeing, here are just a few ideas of small steps that could help you get started:
- Drink an extra glass of water a day
- Swap one daily snack for a healthier alternative
- Incorporate small amounts of exercise throughout your daily routine
- Move your regular bedtime forward
- Cut back on weekly units of alcohol.
By adopting this marginal gains philosophy, you may find you can change for the better, without changing much at all.
