Introduction
Have you ever wondered about what healthy habit could help boost your life the most?
Or, just wondered about if there are easy habits to help make your life healthier?
Well, this is the best place for you. A hard step in becoming more productive is finding habits to make you healthier. In this blog, I have laid out 8 healthy habits that almost everyone should take up. Obviously, there are more habits, I mean, I could write another blog post with 8 more habits. However, these are the simplest and the most basic ones to take up.
So, without further ado, let’s get into it
1. The Importance of Quality Sleep
Now, before I get into it, I know you’ve heard this 1000 times. I don’t think I need to outline the benefits of sleep since it literally benefits all aspects of your life. Although, maybe like you, I also still struggle with it. However, in my research to improve my sleep, I’ve found some quick tips that can give you an extra hour of sleep.
First of all, at least 30 mins before sleeping you should stop using electronics of any kind. Kindles are permissible, but other than that you really shouldn’t be using electronics. You should also not eat a lot before sleeping to make you fall asleep quicker.
Another big issue I personally have is getting caffeine in the afternoon. Look, it takes about 8 hours to completely break down all the caffeine in one cup of coffee. If you’re trying to sleep at 10 and have some coffee at like 4, your sleep schedule is gonna be completely messed up. Therefore, it’s a good rule of thumb to stop having caffeine before 2 just in general.
This is especially important if you want to wake up early in the day. Out of all the healthy habits, sleep probably effects the most things in your body.
2. The Healthy Habit of Drinking Enough Water
Another basic habit that most people lack on. According to scientists, about 75% of people in the US are chronically dehydrated. That is a crazy number, and chances are you’re part of those people who are dehydrated. Dehydration lowers your energy, causes digestive problems, weakens your immune system, and more.
Out of all these healthy habits, I think dehydration affects the most people since it’s really hard to tell if you’re dehydrated or not. First of all, you should find how much water you should be drinking using this daily water intake calculator. Then, you should just roughly estimate how much water each cup you use contains.
Finally, you should log the amount of water you intake every single day and make sure you’re not slacking on it. Logging water combines with logging food, which we’ll talk about in number 4 but for now focus on the water part. Another way to make sure you’re drinking enough is to get one of those big water bottles that tells you how much waters in it.
3. Getting into the Healthy Habits of Exercising
Exercise is one of the most slept on habits by most people. Around 42.5% of adults in the US are considered obese, which is a crazy statistic. That means that about half the adults you’ll meet are considered obese. To avoid being part of this statistic, you should exercise the recommended amount each week.
The recommended amount of aerobic (Cardio) per week is 150 minutes, or 22 minutes per day. While the recommended amount of weight training is about twice a week hitting all the major muscle groups. In the future, I’ll have a blog going more in depth into the science of exercise and how to exercise efficiently. However, for the moment, I’m just gonna give general tips on getting into exercising.
In the beginning, you shouldn’t assume that you’ll be able to hit these figures on the daily. It’s not realistic to go from zero minutes of exercise every week to 150 minutes. However, going from 0 minutes per week to 28 minutes is realistic. That’s 4 minutes of exercise every day. The next week you can increase it to 35 minutes, and so on. Keeping your goals as high as possible while making them achievable is the most important thing you can do to start the healthy habits of exercising and weightlifting.
4. The Power of a Healthy Diet
This will be a much shorter section because there is way too much information about diet to get into. However, there are one or two basic principles that you should follow regardless of what diet you’re doing. You’ve probably heard these a lot, but the more you hear something the more its engrained into your mind.
The first thing is you should be counting calories. When you start dieting, you don’t realize how much trash you’re eating until you see it in front of you. I recommend using MyNetDiary just purely off the free barcode scanning ability. However, if you want to spend money, MyFitnessPal is probably better.
Secondly, you should be lowering the amount of obviously bad things you eat. Fast food, ultra sugary snacks, ultra sugary drinks, etc. Notice how I said lowering, you can’t completely stop eating these foods at first since your body is used to it. Slowly eat less and overtime you’ll start eating none.
5. The Most Underrated Healthy Habit, Meditation
Let me start this off by saying if you think meditation doesn’t work, click off this blog. There is so much evidence that supports meditation, my life literally changed mainly because of meditating. Meditating benefits your body about as much as good sleep does, so it effects everything in your body.
So, with that out of the way, how do you meditate? It’s really simple actually, firstly you should set a timer for 30 seconds. You need to start small with meditating because if you just started meditating there’s no chance you meditate for 5 minutes. Next, remove all background noise or just limit it as much as you can.
Now, the actual meditating, is simple. Focus on your breathe and whenever your mind wanders astray bring it back to the breathe. So, if you start thinking about some random memory, just realize you’re not focused and bring it back to your breathe. Repeat this every time and you’ll eventually get better, just like doing more reps of an exercise makes you stronger.
6. Start Strong with Morning Routines Full of Healthy Habits
This is also a simple section to explain, I have a blog much more in-depth about morning routines. Simply put, you want to do your most difficult work and habits early in the morning. The earlier you finish your work, the less stress you’ll have the rest of the day. You won’t worry about your important work as you’ve done enough for the day.
You should also try to do your habits earlier in the day. For most people, they procrastinate more as the day goes on.
7. Having Healthy Habits with Social Media
This is another habit that needs a lot more explaining than I’ll do here. However, I’ll try to give you the best advice I can in a short amount of time.
The best way to build healthy relationships with social media is to slowly limit it. Let’s say your screen time on YouTube is 3 hours per day on average. Tomorrow, you can set a limit that will kick you out of YouTube at 2 hours and 50 mins. There’s a lot of apps, the best free one is Opal for this.
Then, everyday, you’ll slowly decrease the amount of time you’re using the app. It’ll be easy because when you spend a long time on social media, 10 minutes means literally nothing. An important note is that there is no fast way to quit social media for most people. It’ll take time, so don’t rush it and most importantly, don’t get mad if you go over the limit every once in a while.
8. The Root of Healthy Habits, Learning
As the title suggests, healthy habits are built of learning. Learning is to gain new information about literally anything. Could be historical, philosophical, scientific, literally anything. If you read something you didn’t know before in this blog, you just learn something.
Learning benefits you in literally every aspect of life because knowledge is power, so gaining more knowledge gives you more power. However, most people live their day to day lives without learning anything new. So, in the beginning, your goal should be to learn just one new thing everyday
The best way to learn is to read. Reading is a game changer and will teach you about literally anything. The best part is its free, you don’t have to spend money on books. You could find online pdfs, or just check out books at your library. There should be no excuse for you not to read.
Conclusion
This blog could have easily garnered another 8 habits to add on top, however, it would be too long to focus on. All 8 of these habits are easily implementable and will revolutionize your productivity, so you should get in on these before it’s too late. However, for all of these habits, remember the important rule
Nothing changes if nothing changes
