4 Everyday Habits to Boost Your Mental and Physical Fitness
Your mental health is as important as physical fitness in helping you live a fulfilling and meaningful life. If you’re trying to change your lifestyle and get physically fit and active, your efforts will bear fruit only if you also make a conscious effort to improve your mental wellbeing.
Even something as simple as going for a daily morning walk requires a change in mindset, and if you have bigger goals for your personal and professional life, you’ll need to care for your mind as much as you care for your body.
To give you a head start, adopt the following everyday habits that can help you live a happier and healthier life.
Stop multitasking
Research shows that multitasking is not for everyone and, in fact, it can cause stress and anxiety in people who’re not cut out to do a lot at once. If you multitask simply because everyone else around you is doing it, but it’s not your inherent nature to do several things at a time, you may be feeling overworked, tired or frustrated with your everyday routine.
These feelings can quickly creep into other aspects of your life and affect your personal and social relationships. To know whether you’re stretching yourself too thin in meeting everybody else’s needs, stop multitasking for a few days or one full week. Instead, focus on one task at a time. Do it with intention and complete it to your satisfaction. See if it makes a difference. If it makes you feel even slightly more relaxed and in control, cultivate the habit of doing one thing at a time. Stuff will still get done.
Put away the weighing scale
Losing weight is not just about switching to a low-cal diet. It involves a complete transformation in the way you view fitness.
Well-informed weight watchers know that the bathroom scale is not an accurate indicator of weight loss. When you’re losing fat and gaining muscle, your waist size may reduce but you may not lose too many pounds. This is because muscle mass is heavier than fat. To keep your sanity while striving to adopt a healthy lifestyle, hide the weight scale from your sight and use it every ten days or so rather than weighing yourself thrice a day and getting anxious over not making any progress.
If you’ve tried all sorts of diets but are still struggling to lose fat, here is a big list of weight-loss recipes made with very low-calorie ingredients that maximize nutrition while minimizing your daily calorie intake.
Prioritize sleep and rest
The modern lifestyle is such that we look for ways to unwind after a hard day’s work. Often, this relaxation comes in the form of drinking alcohol with friends, watching television late into the night or simply whiling away our time scrolling social media. All of this comes at a cost that affects both your physical and mental wellbeing, as you’re using your resting hours to do things that bring you short-lived relaxation.
Sleep time is your body’s opportunity to heal and repair itself at the cellular level, and when you don’t give yourself enough shut-eye, you’re essentially putting yourself on the path to disease and aging, as well as mental unrest and unwanted stress. As an experiment, make sleeping a priority over partying, socializing and streaming web shows, and you’ll feel a marked difference in the way you feel each morning.
Cultivate a relationship with food
Everyone knows the importance of nutrition, but few understand or acknowledge the way food impacts our mental health. For instance, did you know that eating too much junk food and drinking sodas and other sugar-laden beverages can cause low mood and even depression?
According to ancient wisdom—and modern science—what you put into your body has a direct impact on your thoughts and feelings, aside from your physiological health. When you eat a lot of processed foods instead of a healthy, wholesome and nutrition-rich diet, your body and mind lose the ability to function properly.
The same principle applies to how you eat your food. To derive maximum nutrition from your food, eat it slowly and without distractions of the cellphone and television screen. Enjoy and relish every bite and chew it completely before swallowing. Drink plenty of water every day and shun smoking and alcohol, which provide a temporary high but also damage your body in more ways than one.
Making small but significant changes in your lifestyle will prep you to meet your long-term goals.
