What is that one habit you are proud of and another that you are guilty about? We have been lectured about habits, good or bad, ever since our childhood. What needs to be understood is that the step after deciding your ultimate goal is to chunk down the goal into little bits of acts that you take up the responsibility of doing every single day, in a recurring manner until you get there. These habits might seem small, but how you do some things is how you do most things. These small acts stack up over time and make you the person of your choosing. Today, you are a result of your habits stacked over the years, good or bad. Tomorrow you can choose to be the kind of a person you wish to be by stacking specific habits over time.
We at BBETTER always want to support your well-being, therefore, here is a list of daily habits you could embrace in order to achieve peak states of health, wellness, and mental health:
-
Set your body clock- Do you find yourself waking up tired in the morning or snoozing your alarm 10 times before you drag yourself out of bed? Your body obeys what you have conditioned it to do overtime. If you don’t have a fixed time to wake up, your body is always going to be confused about optimizing your sleep and wake time differently
-
Make your morning drink- Your morning drink is the first thing to enter your body after a gap of 8-10 hours, where you sure were sleeping but your body was busy cleaning up after you (housekeeping and recovering). Now would you choose to drink nothing or a caffeinated drink first thing when you wake up? You could simply start off by drinking a warm glass of water with lemon juice and honey, a green juice or a fresh fruit juice.
-
Weekend meal plans- Last-minute meal plans and those inviting Zomato notifications club together and spoil your clean eating plans? This is what weekends are for. Yes, they are for unwinding, but sparing a few minutes in meal planning and grocery shopping could be quite therapeutic when you begin with it. If you are not able to meet your body’s requirements then monitoring particular supplements should be a part of your meal planning.
-
Breathing practices- Breath is life. There are several breathing methods to practice, right from our very own Indian Yoga rituals to Wim Hof’s extensive alkaline breathing method. Play around with different methods, pick your favorite, read about them, and of course, make it a non-negotiable part of your routine.
-
Practice mindfulness- The power is in the now as Eckhart Tolle rightly said. Meditation is not everyone’s cup of tea as it is largely perceived as a practice where you need to leave everything and stay still to reach a trance state. You don’t need to be an old sage in order to practice mindfulness.You can do this by enhancing your wholesome sensory presence, noticing what you are seeing (visual), hearing each sound (auditory), feeling every sensation on your skin (kinesthetic), smelling each distinguished fragrance (olfactory).
-
Good leaders are voracious readers- Commit to merely one paragraph a day, even if one particular day you feel absolutely intrigued to read more, stop at one, this would help you to keep that interest built up. Experiment with different genres and authors. Autobiographies are an interesting way to begin with too.
-
Anchor your bed to sleep- As you establish your waking time you need to establish your sleep time as well. Keep your bed space exclusively only for sleep, not to browse through social media, work or eat. This way you anchor your body and the bed exclusively to sleep. Set a time, keep the distractions away, probably listen to guided sleep meditations, focus on your breath, use a heavier blanket and allow yourself to let go of all the stressors.
These might seem like the kind of things you ask a child to do, but that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with it. Tell us you are not as stubborn as a child right now when it comes to prioritizing your health? These little things clubbed together and practiced non-negotiably over a period of a minimum of 21 days, then go on and become habits. Pick up an autobiography or watch a biopic of your role model and we bet there is at least one of these above-mentioned habits or rules that they live by, if not all. That is what you do, model the selective behavior of successful people in order to avoid the silly mistakes they made, cut short the time to optimize results using their experience as a reference road map, and of course, be creative by adding sprinkles of your own final touches with your own theories to list down your non-negotiable habits.
Let’s chunk down the big goals into small habits. Visualize your big game and reverse-engineer your way to these mini habits that you think would take you up there eventually.
