Everyone has their own perception of vitality. Vitality is therefore a broad concept. If you ask PDG Health Services, vitality is the balance between physical and mental well-being, enabling you to perform with pleasure and the active willingness to change what your private and professional life demands of you.

It's a mouthful, but the most important thing to know is that you can work on your own vitality. Of course, we all want to be fit and energetic. But how do you optimize your own vitality?

Achievable goal

It starts with setting a goal. Often, you are inspired by something you hear, for example, by someone who has lost weight or started exercising fanatically. It may also be that you encounter limitations, which leads you to decide to tackle them.

When working on your own vitality, behaviors and patterns come to the surface. Often, big plans are made about what needs to be changed, but when we look back a year later, we often see that not much has come of it. Why is this?

Changing behavior takes time, a lot of time, and perseverance. Research shows that even very simple new habits, such as eating fruit every day, take us more than two months on average to establish... Let alone how much time it takes to change larger or multiple habits.

Conscious plans and habitual behavior

Our brains are involved in two processes: making conscious plans, but also the primary part involving habitual behavior. The brain focuses on achieving enough with as little effort as possible. In addition, there is a natural strong tendency to avoid pain, discomfort, and loss. This hinders the motivation to learn. Furthermore, the final obstacle to changing behavior is the physical and social environment. A bite to eat, a birthday here, a party there. The environment often remains the same, and adopting new behavior is quite a challenge.

What is one way to change your behavior/habits?

  • Set development goals instead of performance goals. By focusing less on performance and more on development, we learn to experience "mistakes" as learning opportunities rather than failures.
  • Enjoy what you do. When we enjoy something, we are more motivated and find it easier to persevere.
  • Ensure you have support from your immediate environment. See what you can change in your immediate environment and communicate with others so that they know what your development goals are!

As vitality consultants at PDG Health Services, we can help you work on development goals aimed at optimizing your vitality!

Want to do more?

Would you like to become even more energetic and focus on this in the workplace? Then take a look at the services offered by PDG Health Services and request more information without obligation. We help managers and employees in organizations to be and remain energetic. Why? Because fit and energetic employees are more productive, enjoy their work more, and are absent much less often than employees who are not fit. It's that simple...