There is no shortage of difficult decisions to make when it comes to our health. Every single day, we must make many choices on what to eat, how to move our bodies, what information to consume, when to go to sleep, and more. While the need to make decisions will never end, there are a few things we can do to help ourselves make the process a little easier. 

When making a difficult choice, there are usually two categories of options we can make. One side of the decision will make our life easier at the moment. For example, when needing to decide what to eat, picking out one meal allows us to eat as quickly as possible. However, this decision only makes our life easier at that moment, because in just a few hours we’ll have to go through the entire process over again. 

In contrast, we could choose to make a decision that will make our life easier in the future. Let’s say this meal we’re choosing is lunch on Monday. If we choose to make our life easier now and go out to eat or cook only one meal, we’re going to spend more time making those decisions again on every other day of the week. To make our decision on what to eat for lunch easier all week, we could spend a few more minutes making the initial decision, and preparing lunch for all five days. 

When thinking about making decisions, I like to use the phrase “choose your hard.” There will be a hard part of every decision, and often we get to choose whether we face the hard part now or later. 

Making the first choice for lunch and only covering one day defers the hard for later, when we have to make the same decision over and over again. Planning our week and going grocery shopping seems like the hard option at the moment because it’s going to take more time, energy, planning and money. 

However, we’ll save so much time, energy and money over the course of the week in comparison to buying each meal individually.

If we zoom out, we can see that almost every decision we make has the option to be easy now and hard later, or hard now and easier later. If we choose easy now, we fall into a cycle of making decisions that leave us feeling stressed, negatively challenged or irritated. 

Unfortunately, because we’re used to making decisions that are easy now and hard later, they’re also familiar. It is challenging to break that pattern, and requires slowing down in order to see our common choices and how we’d like to change them to make our lives easier in the future. 

Making the choice to face the hard part now can be very uncomfortable and terrifying, but is the most growth-promoting. Choosing hard now, easier later requires us to slow down, be aware of the present moment, focus, and respond with the future in mind, instead of reacting to our emotions in the moment. 

We typically avoid the hard because growth is challenging. If we can be intentional about choosing our hard, we will learn, grow, and feel good about what we accomplish. If we’re going to be uncomfortable anyway, it may as well be sooner rather than later, and make our life easier moving forward. 

Making health-promoting choices that are hard now, like exercising regularly and eating nutrient-dense foods, will make our lives easier moving forward.