“Many times we feel exhausted and we don’t need coffee, but water”

It is usually said that three weeks are necessary to make a behavior become a habit. This, in the best case: some investigations speak of more than two months. But what if there were a simpler way to incorporate healthy actions into our day to day? Beatriz CrespoDoctor of Medicine and High Sports Performance, has been working for twenty years in the field of preventive and personalized medicine. The expert has just published the book Healthy microhabitesedited by Penguin Random House. This is a manual with strategies specifically thought to add small doses of health to our daily life without this implying a discouraging effort. With this approach, the book promises “transforming your life in less than two minutes.”

“What are microhabic?” How can we incorporate them?

“They can be a starting point.” I have been studying lifestyle and the big question that I asked me and tell me for more than 15 years and I tell me why it costs us so much to maintain healthy lifestyle habits despite the information that is and the great volume of content that we have today that they explain the importance of doing so. And one of the great keys that explain this is that in many cases, it costs us a lot to strive alone. For me, the key to maintaining healthy living habits is not wanting to start doing something in a day -to -day basis, but wanting to do it when you don’t feel like it. And that is one of the great challenges. Microhabites, in that sense, can be more effective than other changes.

“Why are they more effective?”

– For example, they are much more effective than drastic changes, because the implementation proposed is gradual. Instead of relying on a great willpower to maintain a complex or very large habit, microhabies are small actions that are integrated effortlessly to everyday life in less than two minutes, and that are easy to perform. The methodology that I propose is to understand my day in three microhabic. With three of these small actions of less than two minutes, your day will be better and you are going to take care of yourself. You choose those three habits and you can combine them.

“How can we eliminate the negative burden of having to incorporate a habit?”

“To understand that a habit is neither a challenge nor a challenge nor something that has a start and end date.” Thinking about it makes you frustrate. We have been told that we do not achieve our habits due to lack of constancy, due to lack of willpower, that we are not persistent enough or that we do not repeat enough, but in the middle of 2025 we have to recognize that the key lies in the repetition without stress, in allowing the body and mind to adapt to habit naturally instead of imposing a fight against the resistance itself. Because in addition, when we propose great habits that we are not also able to repeat, the brain generates resistance, has an overload of frustration that is counterproductive. Behavior science has shown that it is small daily actions that in the long run allow us to accumulate large results, with much more durable effects. Radical changes usually fail because there is no immediate reward.

“Many people want to change their diet.” How would this change focus through the methodology of microhabicness?

—One of the most recommended aspects today in Nutrition is trying to generate a microbiota at the intestinal level that is healthy and diverse, to avoid inflammation processes or bad digestions. For this, for example, consuming food of different types helps us. A microhabite can be to introduce a new healthy food every week. It can be a fruit, a vegetable or a legume that we are not accustomed to drink. This helps generate nutritional diversity in your diet. Another important microhabite is to drink more water. Many times we feel exhausted because we lack hydration in the body and we do not need more coffee, what we lack is water. Then, before having the first coffee of the day, drinking a glass of water. And during the day, when you feel hungry, you can drink water to see if it was really hungry or if it was thirst; This is a frequent confusion. If after drinking water you still are hungry, eat.

—In the scope of physical exercise, what microhabits can we apply?

“There is a magic number in medicine that is the 30 squats.” You feel and get up from a chair 30 times and this manages to move the heart and lungs in motion, it has an exponential effect and it takes less than two minutes to do it. So, if every day you set out to make 30 squats, you can do them while you talk on the phone or when you get up from your job to work to go to the bathroom. What if you get to the end of the day and have you done absolutely nothing? Well do at least those 30 squats. Another recommendation that I always do is lower stairs. We are very accustomed to everyone recommending to take the habit of climbing stairs, but many times this is lazy. What many people do not know is that lowering them also generates a different muscle tension to climbing them. Going down stairs, for example, you make abdominals. Every time you take your foot out of the step to go to the next one and you have to balance in that position, squeeze the abdominals. It is a muscle contraction comparable to the abdominals.

“What other habits can you help us in a simple way?”

“I like to say is that rest does not only have to do with sleep hours.” Labor disconnection and digital disconnection also make rest. For this, I propose to use the aromas. When you finish working and you get into the car to return home, you rock it with a perfume that you like and this, sensory, tell your brain and your body to disconnect, it is a change of scope. This is contrasted in studies that talk about the aromas stimulating this chip change.

“I mentioned the technique of the day in three microhabic.” What are the ones you use?

—Fep the microhabic have an exponential effect on health, the key is to integrate them naturally into the daily routine. The key is in the combination, not in strict repetition. Every day what you have to do is choose three micro habits that you feel they are the most suitable for you. You can select the same every day or vary as you feel. The important thing is to make yourself with the commitment to implement at least three daily microhabic. And don’t frustrate yourself. If one day do not repeat the same microhabicness of the previous day, then you do others that do not require effort. As you feel comfortable with those, you can add others. Each one, however small, has a cumulative impact and if, for example, every day we drink water in the morning, we make the 30 squats and sprinkle our favorite aroma when we leave work, the sum of these three actions improves our health and our well -being.

“In the book you also talk about microhabic for our sexual life.” You really don’t usually think about sexuality that way. What benefits have habits in this area?

– Sexuality includes all the emotional, psychological and cultural experience that surrounds sexual identity, but within sexuality is eroticism, which is how sexuality is expressed in more subjective, more symbolic things of pleasure. You, for example, may not have physical sex, but choose clothes that feel good, with which you feel attractive. And many times we don’t give that touch of eroticism to our day to day. Another thing I notice is that we touch ourselves very little. That is why I propose some microhabic oriented to light that erotic that I consider fundamental for our well -being.

“What are some of them?”

“For example, lie on the bed, breathe and let your hands gradually stroke your whole body.” That self -discovery is a gift that we are not doing enough. Then, write down the sexual fantasies you have, or focus on the sensations generated by memories. They can also be emotional fantasies, not just physical acts.