Everybody has periods of time where they slip away from their healthy habits. They stop eating well. They stop being active. They sleep too much or not enough. And maybe they even take up some unhealthy habits, like drinking a little more than they should. Falling into this pattern doesn’t make a person a failure, it just means that they got off their personal track a little bit. If you find yourself in this situation, don’t fret. If you’ve set up a healthy lifestyle before, it’s not that hard to get back into it when you actually plan for it. Here are some tips that can help you get back into healthy habits…
Sit Down and Make a Schedule
First thing is first! Developing healthier habits isn’t usually something that just happens on its own. You need to actually plan for them to happen. This means that you need to sit down and make a list of what changes you want to see. That’s the easy part, though, because you also need to create a plan of implementation. This means making a schedule; one that is actually realistic to stick to. If you want to be more active, plan a time of the day or week when you can fit in a physical activity, and think about what things need to happen around to make that more feasible.
It’s important to set this schedule within the bounds of your current behavior. For example, if you look at your current schedule and notice that you have a couple of hours in the week that you don’t do anything, then that’s a great place to plan to do something that works towards your goals.
Cut Back on the Social Media
It’s a bit cliche to point out that social media is both a blessing and a curse, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Social media is intrinsically tied into so many things, nowadays, that it’s hard to condemn it outright, but it would be disingenuous not to say that we spend far too much time, on average, on social media platforms. This time spent staring at our phones is rarely constructive and actually might have a detrimental effect on our mental health.
As such, trying to cut down on your social media usage will open up a lot of time for healthier habits and is a benefit in and of itself. There are apps in modern smartphones where you can actually set limits on how much you are using specific apps, which means that there’s no excuse for spending 3 hours on Instagram anymore.
Only Buy Healthy Food
It’s a lot easier to start eating healthy if the only option that you give yourself is the health one. Before your next stop to the grocery store, make an in-depth list of healthy food options that you actually enjoy eating. Do some research beforehand on ways that you can improve your diet. After you have your list, go to the store and only get those healthy options. This takes the convenience out of eating unhealthy food since the most convenient option at home will always be healthy.
Don’t Treat Health as “All-or-Nothing”
When you are making changes to live a more healthy and balanced life, don’t treat these habits as if they are “all-or-nothing.” That’s actually a very unhealthy way to look at health because it makes you feel a tremendous amount of shame when you fall off track. That’s a dramatic outlook and doesn’t help anybody. Instead, you should look at healthy habits as trends that your life can follow.
Think of the number of healthy and unhealthy things that you do each day. If you’re making an effort, the number of unhealthy things you are doing will decrease, while the healthy actions will rise. At the end of the day, if you change the trends of your life, then you’re moving in the right direction. If you have a bad day, though, don’t treat it as the end of the world. Just get up and do a little better the next day.
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