10 Healthy Habits

If there are two things we love at Synergy Health (after accounting for coffee, bikes, and dogs…), it is a good framework and engaged clients who like to ask us why?

Our 10 Healthy Habits have been our core framework for well over a decade now. And despite their simplicity and face validity, and perhaps even because of this, we routinely get questions about them. Why 10? Why those 10? What research do you have to support them? These are all great questions. Importantly, they are the very same questions we ask ourselves as part of our ongoing review processes.

In developing the 10 Healthy Habits, we wanted something which is simple, face valid, cuts through a lot of the confusion in the health and wellbeing space, is relevant to the organisational development needs of our clients, and, importantly, is supported by a robust body of evidence. The 10 Healthy Habits conceptual framework ticked all of those boxes.

They’re a heuristic, meaning that they are designed to cut through a lot of the complexity of popular health information (without dumbing things down to the point of no longer being useful), helping individuals to understand their own health behaviours and more easily make positive changes.

“Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.”
Evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1973

To say that these habits have stood the test of time is perhaps an understatement. Most are underpinned by human evolutionary biology, and specifically the Mismatch Hypothesis, which at its simplest states that our biology is mismatched to the modern environments we find ourselves in most of the time.

Think about the likes of highly processed foods, sitting all day, changes in light exposure, sleep patterns, stress loads, socialisation, and so on. There is good, ahem, synergy, between key focus areas identified through this evolutionary biology lens and contemporary research spanning the domains of nutrition, physical activity, psychological health, etc., which we applied to the development of the 10 Health Habits. Think of it as a ‘moving forward while looking back approach.’

How are the 10 Healthy Habits best used? We like to think of them as key skills for people to identify with and develop over time. Take a domain like nutrition. The two key skills within our 10 Healthy Habit framework for this domain are Reduce Fake Foods and Eat Real Food. Asking people to reduce their consumption of processed foods and increased their consumption of nutrient-dense whole foods isn’t particularly controversial and sounds simple, right? Not when modern environments often work against us. We can break each habit (skill) down into easy daily practices (behaviours), and incrementally work toward improving our wellbeing.

The 10 Healthy Habits inform and organise our content (articles, challenges, podcast). Information derived from an individual’s Wellbeing Scorecard then provides a starting point and stepping stones for individuals to develop good daily practices with respect to the 10 Healthy Habits. It is these daily practices which everyone can make their own, no matter their identity - country, culture, gender, or sexuality. If you think of the 10 Healthy Habits as the outlines in a colouring book, it is via an individual’s daily practices that they get to choose how they colour their own health picture in.
It's your program, your way.

We are very proud of our 10 Healthy Habits. In a world often obsessed with wellbeing outcomes, we think our focus on the process of developing skills and practices using the 10 Healthy Habits framework offers individuals a practical pathway toward better health. We also recognise that there are many other frameworks around which will also resonate with people.

While we believe that the 10 Healthy Habits encapsulate the majority of the key health behaviours people should focus on in a simple, robust, and evidence-based way, we are totally cool if, via the awareness our 10 Healthy Habits create, individuals find other frameworks which speak to them and which help them with their daily health practices.

We help people find their why with our 10 Healthy Habits. How they put these into practice in their life is part of their own personal journey - and we’re happy to support that!