When it comes to health and well-being, people tend to over-complicate things. There are many small, manageable steps you can take to improve your life rather than making a huge change all at once. If you already have a healthy outlook on life, there’s always something you can do to make it a little better.
Here are four easy ways you can improve your health and well-being today, without overhauling your entire life.
Go With Your Gut
The acknowledgment of the importance of good gut health has increased over the past decade, now that researchers are starting to understand the complexities of our gut as our second brain. Improving your gut health will ultimately be a long-term commitment, but there are small steps you can start taking to ease yourself into the journey.
Consider taking science backed supplements to increase your intake of probiotics to improve your immune system and digestive tract health. Ingest more foods with naturally occurring probiotics, like yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, and kefir. Taking these small steps will make a huge impact on your health and well-being over time.
Unplug and Reset
Advancements in technology have given humankind a plethora of benefits – improved communication, life-saving medical developments, faster transportation, etc. However, it’s lived up to its reputation as a double-edged sword. Excessive screen time and social media use has been linked to numerous psychological and mood issues as well as diminished attention-spans and damaged sleep patterns.
Take steps toward limiting your time online. Set small, manageable goals, such as not checking your phone for an hour before bed and an hour after getting up. Set up automatic do-not-disturb times and leave your phone in another room as you go about your evening. In time, you’ll find that you are sleeping better and feeling more productive.
Go Outside
Schedule a date with the big, wide world outside your window and take advantage of the biophilia hypothesis – the idea that we as living creatures are innately connected to the living world around us. Spending time outside can get you moving, reduce stress, and enrich you with some much-needed vitamin D from the sun.
Set a goal of spending 10-15 minutes outside without distraction each day. That means you aren’t out there playing on your phone and your trips to and from your car don’t count. Combine your outside time with a walk, and you’ll practically feel the stress melt away.
Set Nutrition Goals
We live in a society that focuses on nutrition as an aspect of beauty rather than health and wellness. As such, we end up following fad diets that ultimately deprive us of the things we need to live. You can offset this by setting small nutritional goals and creating a shift toward healthier living.
Nutrition goals could look something like this: one week your goal is to eat an apple every morning as a snack between breakfast and lunch. The next week you swap out you reduce your coffee by one scoop of sugar while still eating that apple. The week following, you add a green vegetable to your dinner every night.
Habits and Change
You may have noticed that all of these tasks include changing your habits in incremental steps. This helps ensure that your changes are manageable and sustainable. It’s much easier to start taking a probiotic supplement every day for a week and feel successful than it is to completely overhaul your life and feel like a failure after three days.
Making small changes results in a correlating change in your behavior patterns, making it easier to stick to your goals and building a foundation so you can grow and improve your health and well-being.
Article Submitted By Community Writer
