Effective Ways To Build Healthier Habits
Living a healthy life is easier said than done. You may find every second person suggesting to practice a healthy lifestyle. Additionally, we can see tutorials on Youtube, magazines, commercials, and in more places following the tips of a healthy lifestyle and how it helps us better and live longer.
But, do you think it’s easy? Absolutely not. And to help you overcome the obstacles, we’ve crafted this article that contains some handy & effectives lifestyle tips.
Well before moving towards how to develop healthier habits, let us tell you what changes it can make in your overall lifestyle and let you know the importance of developing healthier habits.
Healthier habits lead to a healthy lifestyle. Though, it is not all about losing weight or eating healthy but a healthy lifestyle indicates how attentive, courageous, and active you are. A healthy lifestyle drastically contributes to a healthy body that eventually reduces the risk of developing life-threatening diseases like diabetes, blood pressure, depression, stress, and heart attack, etc.
Habits are not born gifted, all have to determine habits here by measuring the needs of life. We tend to wake up at the same time each day, we start our day with a cup of coffee, commute to work, and follow the same pattern every day. Why? Because we have become habitual of this routine and we’ve gradually developed these habits. So, where is it hard to develop new habits for a healthy life? To change your lifestyle with healthy habits can be difficult but not impossible.
Behavioral scientists who study habit formation said — many of us strive to create new and healthy habits the wrong way. We start with bold resolutions like to start with vigorous exercise or lose weight without taking required steps into account like setting up our mind. To develop healthy habits, you need to be a little strict with your time-table, more concentrated, and focused. If you find it not your cup of tea, here are some easy to follow tips backed by research for forming new healthy habits.
1. Stack Your Habit
On behalf of the experts’ reports, the best way to form a new habit is to tie with the existing ones. Just look at the pattern you follow the entire day and think about how to create a new over exciting one. For many of us, morning tea or coffee is the start of the day. Hold on, we are not asking to skip your bed tea, just give one minute to meditation & yoga after getting up from bed. You might choose to do squats or practice to a single leg bridge stance while brushing your teeth.
Similarly, most of you, including me sometimes, end your day on your couch while streaming videos watching TV, that can be replaced with a single Yoga pose such as staff pose, seated pose, thunderbolt pose and more.
2. Start With Small
According to “The Stanford University” researcher & author of the book “Tiny Habits” – big behavior changes required a high level of motivation that is hard to sustain. Starting with small changes increases possibilities of developing new changes in your habit . For example, if you start exercising, initiate with the warm-up for at least one week. Or start with a simple and short walk in the morning or evening time.
Starting with small will help you to perform your activity easily. Gradually increasing the numbers will not let you feel the burden and you will become habitual of doing it.
3. Don’t Skip
If you want to stick to a healthy habit, make it your routine. The reality is that habits take a long time to create, but they form faster when you do them more often. So start with the reasonable thing you want to convert into your good habit that is really easy to do. You are more likely to stick with the activity which is something easy and small. For instance, if you find crunches hard to crack, do any other cardio like skipping or treadmill. Rather than missing out the activity which is hard to perform, stick to the activity you find easy & interesting. Once it becomes a habit, you can do more.
4. Make It easy
Habit researchers found in the studies that we are more likely to develop new habits when there are no obstacles in our way. Packing your bags and getting ready with your tracksuit may leave you sometimes tired. So choose the exercise that doesn’t require much effort or leaving the house like sit-ups, skipping, jumping jacks and others especially yoga & meditation.
Developing healthier habits isn’t only limited to exercise. Your even thought of leaving the smoking habit is a big contribution to developing healthier habits. So, if you really want to drop your smoking, reduce the number of smoking, or engage your mouth with some mouth freshener when you are badly keen on smoking.
5. Reward Yourself
Rewards encourage you to perform activities that’s why it is an important part of developing healthier habits. Some activities like brushing your teeth show immediate rewards but what about those that take a longer time to show up –like weight loss. For this reason, you need to build some immediate reward to yourself to help you to stick to the process that can boost your mind and encourage you. Listen to the songs while running, get some gift for yourself that makes you feel happy to promote your mood to perform good things.
6. Take it A Challenge
Now, as you know and observed from the aforementioned details, building healthier habits is not as easy as it seems and also not so difficult. So to make it your cup of tea, consider it a challenge which gives you small tips every day to help you move forward, refresh your mind, and nourish your body. For instance, if you pledge to kick your drinking habit, find friends with the same thoughts which will make it challenging and easier for you.
7. Don’t Stress
A healthier life shouldn’t feel like so much burden of work. If it does, you’re less likely to stick with your work. Rather than taking too generic routes to build healthier habits, figure out what makes you feel happy and what is easier for you to opt, that also suits your personality and empowers & excites you. When you design your life around the things that you love to do, it will stop requiring much effort. Else, just find the happiness in the small things around you because happiness needs no reason.
The time when you start thinking about healthy habits is the time you take a step ahead towards a healthy lifestyle which is most important if you’re looking forward to a luxurious and healthy life.
Part of developing healthy habits is setting the right environment and one of the most important parts of the environment is people around you. If you vow to eat healthier and your friends ask to smoke or drink, you’re setting up yourself for failure. Increase your existence around family and close friends who encourage you to adopt healthy habits. It will not only increase your chances of success but also improve your health with a good lifestyle.
Another effective step that you can take to build healthier habits is to be happy and find happiness in small things. Once you find the joy in living healthy, that’s when life sticks to healthy habits. If you want to know more benefits of a healthy lifestyle, we have collected abundant knowledge from nook and cranny just to make your life more beautiful.