During these times our lifestyles and our habits are the only things that come in handy. We all have some sets of positive and negative habits. They help us step out of our daily rut and focus on important projects or aspects of our life. 

Here’s why having a healthy lifestyle is important:

1. It Keeps You Away From Chronic Illness

Since childhood we’ve all learned that exercising everyday keeps us healthy and away from diseases. Eating a balanced diet, exercising regularly and having a proper sleep schedule helps you prevent major illnesses like heart-related diseases or any other chronic diseases. 

2. Improves Enthusiasm Towards Life

When you switch to living the positive lifestyle your motivation to be better increases. You become more optimistic and determined towards your goals. 

It’s true that you might not feel 10/10 everyday but with a positive mindset and habits you’ll be able to pull yourself back up. 

3. Better Focus and Productivity 

When you’re stress free it becomes easier to focus on your work and get things done. With having a healthy lifestyle, you’ll be able to carry out work effortlessly and never have to worry about burn out.

Now you might ask, what if the positive habits in my daily life are outnumbered by negative habits and mindsets?

The simple answer is you can always re-assess them. You can always change your negative habits into positive ones. 

Here are a few ways through which you can break free of your unhealthy lifestyle and adapt to a routine that suits you

1. Review your life

Take a moment to sit down in silence. Make sure that during that time there is nothing to distract you (put your phone away and kids to sleep.) Think of the current scenarios that you want to change. Go through all of your life’s stages one by one and try to pin-point the changes that took place in your life. Are those changes in your behaviour good or bad? Do you want to change them? Is there any specific thing that you think should go back to how it was for instance having more ‘me time’ for yourself?

Make a note of all the changes you think that happened in your life and the things you’d love to change about your life. 

2. Are those changes temporary or permanent

Once you figured out the changes now it’s time for you to decide if these situations that occurred in your life are temporary or permanent. Like having a baby or joining a new job are pretty huge changes and you’ll need to create a routine around those changes. 

Most of the times our old routines and habits need to be altered because our new conditions demand more or less time from us. So, when we feel like we are devoting less time towards our routines (It can be anything from cleaning your house to taking time off for self-care) we might feel unproductive. 

That’s why it’s imperative that we create our routines in a way that fits well with our current conditions and jobs.

3. What are your goals? Are they aligned with your current situation?

Make a list of your goals. What do you plan to achieve in a set period of time? Think about if your goals are aligned with your current situation. 

For instance, maybe your previous job didn’t require you to go to your office and you used to   exercise for 1 hour and start working at home at 10:00 a.m. 

Now the situation has changed. Maybe now you’re required to go to the office at 8 a.m. leaving you with no time to exercise. This might be a reason for major frustration since you are habitual to working out every morning. 

Every day you’re now stressed out about how you are not able to keep up with your routine. But maybe you’re coming home early and that’s leaving you with an ample amount of time to exercise, rest and cook for yourself.

So, now you can actually keep up with work in the morning and exercise in the evening. And instead of one full hour, you might also cut it short to 30 minutes. In this way, your goal gets aligned with your current situations. 

1. Set up new goals

As we saw in the previous example, find out if your existing goals and situations are aligned or not. If they aren’t aligned make a new goal that goes with your current life situation.

As a stay at home mom, you might have the habit of doing the chores, looking after kids and taking out an hour or two of ‘me-time.’ However, now you are starting your own small business and you get so busy that you don’t have enough time to sleep and forget about self-care. 

In this case, your self-care goal should shrink down to 15 minutes per day or a few hours once a week. Do it every day and make it your new routine.  It’s all about packing your lifestyle goals around your jobs, life, and/or other situation because let’s be real, life doesn’t go as planned.

2. Get an accountability partner. 

The worst thing you could do is create goals and not execute them daily. Ask a friend or your partner to create goals too and check in with them every other day to see if they’ve achieved their goals and vice-versa

This will help you to carry out the task diligently because who likes to lose with their friends? Not me.

3. Monitor your growth with your new goals and routine

This step is of utmost importance. Don’t just create routines. Track your growth. Are you seriously able to carry out those routine tasks or is it becoming more of a boring chore that takes too long to finish?

Journal your habits. If something is taking too long remember it’s time to scrap it out and make a new habit instead. If you’re getting bored, then there is no point in doing it half heartedly. 

Make sure you take some time out and create new routines every now and then that suits you. Don’t just copy the routines that others have created for themselves. 

Also, don’t shy away from reducing the time for which you do certain things. Like reading for an hour can be reduced to 2 pages everyday if you don’t have much time and something more important is waiting to be done. 

4. Execute!

And last but not the least, do execute your habits and goals. Having a healthy lifestyle doesn’t have to be a chore that you have to do in order to get an amazing life like some influencer

s. It has to be something that is fun to you and easily doable for you. 

Building habits is not a piece of cake especially when it’s building positive habits. But with slight determination you can actually adapt to new habits fairly quickly. Also, there’s a quite popular habit rule that helps you develop lifelong healthy habits. 

The 21/90 habit rule is gold for everyone trying to build a positive lifestyle.  

It goes like this: You commit to a certain habit for 21 days. Once you are done with 21 days it’s more or less has become a part of your daily life. Now, carry out the same habit for 90 days. Once you do that, the habit becomes ingrained in your lifestyle forever, unless you wish to change it. 

Want to find a better routine for yourself?