Building Healthy Habits
Building healthy habits is all about consistency. This doesn’t mean that you have to change your life drastically to make it work for you, but rather that you need to focus on small changes every day for them to become a habit. Habits are vital because they make our lives easier and streamline the mundane tasks which we don’t even notice anymore.
Jordan Sudberg says that healthy habits don’t have to be difficult to maintain. When a healthy habit becomes routine, you won’t even have to think about it anymore.
Taking care of your health can never be one of those boring chores that you occasionally forget about. Rather than approaching your health as something that has to be done or wasted, consider the idea that good health is worth the effort, and not doing so is actually much more of a waste than just taking care of yourself regularly.
Tips For Building a Healthy Habit
It’s easy to form a single healthy habit, such as eating one healthy meal every day, but what happens when a person wants to build a whole new set of habits? How can they ensure that their old patterns don’t creep back in and undo all of the progress that they are making?
Sudberg outlines the following tips to help a person build new and better habits:
1. Writing it Down
Put yourself on a schedule. Write down how many times you performed your healthy habit in a day and try to beat that the next day. You can do this for each part of your healthy habit, from how many glasses of water you drink to how often you check Facebook so that it’s easier for you to improve your progress.
2. Planning Ahead
If there are things that will derail your schedule and make it more likely for you to neglect your healthy habit, then try and plan ahead.
Sudberg explains that people who get up an hour early each day to exercise are often much more successful with their goals because they have plenty of time to change and shower before they have to be at work.
3. Be Patient
While it may seem like the more you practice your healthy habit, the faster you will be able to form one, but it isn’t always true. So don’t get frustrated and try to force the habit into your life by practicing for hours every day. Start with a few minutes or a few days and work your way up from there.
4. Recognizing Success
Building healthy habits is all about achieving small but significant successes. You should feel as though you are making progress every day, and you can gauge whether these changes are progressing in the right direction by looking at how they affect your life. A simple example of this is the person who has trouble committing to their exercise routine one day but sees that their sleep habits have significantly improved when they wake up refreshed and energized the following day.
5. Reward Yourself
Create a reward system. This means that you are going to give yourself something special on days where you meet your goals and get what you want. For example, if you are trying to write more often, there will be a surprise waiting for you when you finish that first post. If it’s something simple, such as your favorite dessert, then that will be enough because it’s proof that practicing these habits is worthwhile in the end.
6. Avoiding Negativity
Negative thoughts can not only be harmful to your relationships, but they can also derail your progress. For example, if you are feeling bad because you didn’t stick with a healthy habit, then it’s often easier to just quit and say that it wasn’t worth the effort in the first place. By refocusing your energy on something positive, such as how proud you are of yourself for trying, you can avoid this trap and find a new way to motivate yourself.
What are the Benefits of Building Healthy Habits?
Jordan Sudberg believes that it is almost impossible to develop a good fitness and healthy eating plan without working out your mind. There are many benefits that you will get from getting yourself motivated to build healthy habits.
1. A Fit, Healthy Mind
The mind-body connection is the theory that physical health and emotional well-being are linked and can be influenced by thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In other words, your overall health is improved when you have a healthy mental state.
2. A Stress-free Life
A stress-free life is a term that refers to the benefits that you get from learning how to control your stress levels and emotions. The more relaxed you become, the better you feel and look.
3. Healthy, Happy Relationships
The relationships in our lives are the most important thing for us. When you have healthy relationships with important people, you become happier and more confident.
4. A Healthy Body
When your mind is healthy and happy, the body benefits from it. With less stress and more motivation comes a healthier life and body.
5. More Energy
Although it may not be easy to imagine how your mental health affects your energy levels, there is a link between the two. A healthy mind has more energy than an unhealthy one.
6. Longer Life
As boring as it may sound, you will live longer if your mind is healthy. The results of a study conducted by the National Institute on Aging show that those in excellent health were 80 percent more likely to live over the age of 85 than those in poor health.
Wrapping Up
Building healthy habits is a skill that needs to be learned to make your life healthy. A person cannot choose to do it or ignore it. It is an essential step that every individual should take to make their life better and build a healthy lifestyle.
Healthy habits are not found overnight, but they play an important role in one’s physical and mental health.
