Daily Habits
We all need daily habits to help us maximize our abilities and enjoy a healthy lifestyle.
Develop a Night-Time Routine
We live in an era of busyness. We are expected to always be on and many love to wear the badge of honor.
But sleep is one of the (if not the) most important components of health.
When we think of good daily habits to develop, sleep is rarely even on the list. But developing a night routine is crucial to level up your life.
Sleep
helps us consolidate memories, process information in the background, and strengthen our energy levels for the challenges ahead. World-class athletes, like Roger Federer, know the importance of resting to perform at their best.
Exercise
Your body is your most important tool.
The best way to take care of it is to develop the habit of exercise regularly.
Exercise has tremendous benefits both for the body and the mind. For starters, it boosts your confidence and energy levels. It’s also a great way to combat stress and turn you into a calmer person.
And the cherry on the cake: you’ll sleep better!
Don’t make the mistake of going to the gym for an hour and lift weights until you pass out.
Start small and develop the habit into your daily schedule and then ramp it up.
Exercise a couple of minutes every day. Get started
To make exercise a daily habit, schedule it into your calendar and set reminders.
If possible, always exercise at the same time. This will help you build a routine before, during, and after exercising.
Eat Healthily
Food is fuel for your body.
Having a healthy diet gives you more energy, increases productivity, and fuels your workouts.
Eating healthier is one of those good daily habits that everyone is aware of but few of us practice.
Why? We all know what real food is. Meat, fish, vegetables, nuts: good. Chips, candy, soda: not so great.
We don’t see our diet as an important part of our habits. But once you get it in your head how much your diet influences your life-energy levels, good decision making, mood, happiness-you instantly make the switch to be more mindful of what you eat.
An easy hack to eating healthier is to cook at home: restaurants normally add a lot of salt and sugar to the food in order to enhance the flavor. When you cook from home, you have more control over ingredients and preparation methods.
And here’s another pro tip: if you only have healthy and tasty food in your house, you don’t even have to make a choice. You’ll eat what is in front of you. Your diet starts at the supermarket.
Meditate
Meditation is self-observation.
It helps you develop concentration, clarity, emotional positivist, and a calm seeing of the true nature of things.
I consider meditation a keystone habit.
I normally meditate in the morning for 10–15 minutes using Headspace. It affects many other areas of my life: work, productivity, personal development, mood, relationships, stress, etc.
I suggest you start with basic level meditation, which is designed to help you take a step back, disentangle yourself from your thoughts and re-enter your body.
To develop the habit of meditating daily, start small.
Just meditate for 2 minutes per day. You can get started using these free guided meditations.
Don’t worry about depth or “doing it right”. That comes later. For now, just focus on building the habit of meditating every day.
As you get used to the meditation practice, you can scale it up to 5 or 10 minutes, whatever works best for you. Assess the impact that meditation has in your life and which areas you want to improve and focus on meditating specifically for improving on those areas.
Eliminate Clutter
The cost of goods has decreased rapidly over the last few decades and we now possess a lot of everything. Own fewer clothes, shoes, cooking materials, bedding sheets, and towels.
Give away or throw directly in the trash to create white space in your life.
But De-cluttering your life is more than just getting rid of materialistic possessions:
it’s about focusing on less goals (one is enough), eliminating items from your to-do list, letting go of toxic relationships, consuming less social media, cancelling the gym membership you never use, bailing on time-consuming meetings and pointless arguments, keeping your desk clean at the end of the day, and single-tasking.
Use the 80/20 rule to find the truly important things in your life. Focus on the 20% of things that bring you 80% of the results. This will help you stop sweating the small stuff and focus on the bigger picture instead.
Simplify your life. Remove to have more time for the things you love.
Journal your life
Using a Journal is the most effective way to understand your past, present, and future.
Writing your thoughts down every day helps you sort your mental clutter, be clearer on your ambitions and goals, consolidates what you learn, increases your gratitude, and improves insight and understanding of your life.
A journal records the entire life history that you can look back on and see how much you’ve grown.
To get started, start simple: write one thing you accomplished, one thing you are grateful for, and one thing you are struggling with. Once you have developed the habit of writing daily, you can expand on your template by adding other things you find relevant, like progress on big goals and steps you are taking to accomplish them.
To make journaling one of your good daily habits, make it a part of your nigh-time routine. Write down your thoughts on a notebook before going to bed and let your brain process the information during sleep.
To start developing these good daily habits, follow these 3 rules:
- Start Small: in the beginning, your only objective is to include these good daily habits in your routine; start with the minimum possible to remove friction to start
- Ramp It Up: after the habits are a part of your daily routine, push the boundaries a little more, by adding difficulty or time
- Don’t Skip Twice in a Row: follow a productivity hack from Seinfeld called Don’t Break the Chain; have a calendar on the wall and mark a big X every day you perform your habit; your only job is to not break the chain and if you miss a day don’t skip twice in a row.
What you are today and what you will accomplish has a direct relation to the quality of the habits you form.
Adopt these good daily habits and start transforming your life today.
