Lifestyle represents your daily activities involving how you think, act, eat and live. These actions are your choices and tend to influence your life massively. Overall, they reflect your attitude, values, and personality.
Lifestyle changes are necessary to enhance the quality of your life. For instance, sticking to a healthy diet and daily exercising will benefit your long-term health. While medications can help you lose weight, reduce pain symptoms, etc., implementing lifestyle changes will help you become more aware, disciplined, and ethical.
Primarily, these changes include your habits and behavior that promote positivity in your life. As you start this journey with new and sensible modifications, you will notice drastic effects on your personal well-being. (1)
The food you consume, your daily activities, the amount and quality of sleep altogether determine your life by influencing your physical and mental health.
Healthy Lifestyle Changes
Let’s say you have a goal in life, to follow your passion, such as to be an athlete, a businessman, or someone in the entertainment industry. All these have one thing in common: being consistent in whatever you do.
Now, some things in your life might influence you negatively, making you feel unproductive and restless. When you are not being consistent with something, it inevitably feels like unproductivity. That’s how the mind and body function.
This is when you need to incorporate lifestyle changes to be physically and mentally healthy. Once you do that, you will get back on track with your passion or do something that gives you immense happiness.
Changes are nothing but modifying the things that you have control over. Some of the important routines of your life are:
- Eating habits
- Physical activities
- Sleeping schedule
- Behaviour
- Thinking patterns
Changing your habits cost you nothing. It has more to do with how profound you want your life to be – happy, joyful, and eternally blissful.
How To Change Lifestyle?
Making healthy lifestyle changes is not as easy as snapping fingers. Its formation takes place when you are consciously aware of your old habits and take the necessary actions to break them. Awareness that takes place not only once but throughout your life.
It’s a process that takes patience, dedication, and tremendous amounts of energy. According to psychologists, it takes an average of 25 days to form an automatic habit, where the action begins to feel natural without any effort. However, maintaining lifestyle changes highly depends on the individual. (2)
One of the easiest and most effective methods for making lifestyle changes is habit replacement. If you identify a particular unhealthy habit, replace it with something related instead of starting a random one. For instance, the habit of overthinking while eating can be replaced with the awareness of eating – the food’s taste and texture.
The best way to make long-lasting healthy changes is to start small. The primary approach is to identify and be aware of every bad habit and analyze how it affects your overall lifestyle. Once you have done that, start making fundamental changes that will bring about balance in your system.
It is important to understand that there are a few things that you need to get rid of completely to let the “healthy changes plan” work for you. At the same time, there are also some easy strategies to develop a lifestyle plan. Some of the essential steps are:
1) Focus on your entire routine
As mentioned earlier in this blog, lifestyle includes everything you do on a daily basis. It’s a bit complex because several pieces make up the whole picture. Focusing on one area of life can leave the other parts left open.
Make sure all parts of your health – physical, mental, and emotional are given equal importance because they help make and break habits.
a) Diet: Food is an integral part of your lifestyle because it tends to influence your physical as well as mental health. Fueling yourself with healthy food containing all the essential nutrients will ensure that your brain and body can function at its best.
Eating junk food not only harms your physical health but also affects you psychologically. It decreases your ability to control impulsive behaviors, contributing more to the unhealthy pattern of living.
b) Exercise: Exercising or engaging in any physical activity is key to living a pleasurable lifestyle because doing so releases several chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine and serotonin. They are responsible for keeping you happy and motivated and promoting sleep, mood, and body healing.
c) Sleep: As most professionals recommend that adults should sleep for 7-9 hours, it is not always mandatory to follow that. It is the quality of sleep that determines how active, youthful and energetic you are. (3)
Long hours of sleep don’t necessarily promote good health. Besides, it can even make you restless and anxious and cause irritability. During quality restful sleep, your mind and body recharge themselves with healing energy, which is integral for learning and implementing healthy habits.
2) Spend some alone time
You cannot have clarity about what you want to do in life when you are not psychologically balanced. Therefore, bringing balance to your mental health is vital to finding your inner passion or talent.
Hence, it would help if you start this journey by spending some time alone, looking after yourself. The quality of aloneness brings forth an extraordinary passion for personal development. Eventually, you will focus more on your passion and interests instead of worrying about what others think about you.
3) Question your way of living
Being curious and asking about your current way of living is the most significant part of a lifestyle change. Discovering what you love or your most profound goal can help you stay positive and motivated during the whole process.
When you discover what that is, you will naturally want to build a healthy lifestyle to achieve your goal. So, focusing on your overall health, including your diet, activities, and rest period is beneficial.
4) Take time to adopt new habits
Habits are essentially built on time. Be patient with yourself and understand that changing your lifestyle is never about getting to the finish line as quickly as possible. It’s a fascinating journey by itself that you should embrace and enjoy.
What matters is to build habits that you can sustain in your daily life. So, make sure to start small and give yourself the time and energy that you need to keep your foundation stable throughout life.
What are the benefits of changing lifestyle?
Making changes to your lifestyle is undoubtedly beneficial to your health, profession, and the right relationships that you build with people around you. Moreover, it can also change your perspective towards life – making you see the world differently or, let’s put it, “spiritually.”
1) Prevents and manages lifestyle diseases
Certain diseases occur when you have a messy lifestyle where you are stressed, nutritionally imbalanced, and do not have clarity about what you want to do.
A healthy lifestyle can reduce the risk of any disease. More importantly, it keeps you active and mindful, which is essential to living a youthful and joyful life.
2) Economical living
Leading a healthy lifestyle of eating nutritional food, exercising, and managing stress on your own will save you a great deal of money by decreasing the number of doctor visits and other treatments.
3) Increased peace and happiness
The fundamental motive for changing lifestyle is to be peaceful, calm, happy, and joyful. Cutting off junk food, working out, doing yoga, and meditating produces feel-good hormones that have calming effects. These are responsible for keeping you feel happy, secure, and motivated all day long.
4) Enhanced vitality and creativity
The physical body can’t function at optimal energy when it is fueled with junk food or leftovers. Additionally, when lack of activity is added to this lifestyle, the mind becomes duller and the body heavier.
This is because these behaviors respond negatively to the human system and disrupt the ability to sustain appropriate energy levels. Therefore, nourishing your body with wholesome foods, sunlight, physical activity, and clean water is fundamentally required. It is what your body naturally needs to stay healthy and active.
5) Increased lifespan
Healthy habits till the age of 50, such as no smoking, moderate alcohol consumption, sticking to a good diet, and maintaining a healthy weight, are all connected to living a longer life.
Following what your body “needs” and not “wants” is the right approach to changing your lifestyle.