Healthy Habits to Help Reach Your Healthy Goals

Whether it’s a New Year’s resolution, a decision you’ve come to with your partner or just something that feels like it’s right for you, reaching any health goals that you’ve set for yourself can be a real challenge. Forming new habits is difficult to do, and for those of us who don’t have a lot of self-discipline, it is even harder. Reaching goals is easy enough for athletes who have coaches and managers constantly helping them to stay disciplined, if you’re working with a clinical trial management system to confirm an exciting medical discovery, or even if you’re in a team exercise class…but what if you aren’t in any of those situations? What tools do you have at your disposal? We’ll tell you: you have this list of helpful habits!

To get from point A to point B, you may need to implement some changes along the way: habits that can help you reach the goals that you’re striving to achieve. If you put in a little extra effort, you can change your life for the better by adjusting a few things to get the end result you need. If you take on these helpful habits as part of your daily routine, you’ll reach your health goals before you know it.

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Break It Down

To achieve your goals, you have to break them down into bite-sized pieces. Making sure that you understand all the steps and hard work that will be involved as you are setting goals, is the only way to ensure that you aren’t getting in over your head and are staying realistic about where you want to get to. Create immediate, short term and long term goals instead of overwhelming yourself with huge amounts of work.

Manage Mental Health

Your mind is the most important weapon in your arsenal: any physical actions that you take, or fail to take, start with how you think and feel. If your mental state is not balanced and well looked after, there’s no way that other aspects of your life will be balanced or well looked after either. Taking care of your mental health might mean any number of things depending on you, your personality and your mental health needs. If you have an existing mental health condition that requires treatment and medication, you must keep up with both of these to ensure that you are well. If you visit a psychiatrist, sticking to your appointments and doing the work required is necessary to stay healthy and feel your best. Things like spending time with loved ones, getting out into nature and engaging in hobbies that you do simply because you enjoy them are all also integral parts of keeping an eye on your mental health. If you are mentally well, you can form habits that keep you physically well!

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Plan Your Plate

Different health goals will have different dietary requirements. We are by no means advocating a “diet” because as we all know, diet culture does not work. We are simply advising that knowing what will best fuel your body as you try to reach your goals, will speed up the process considerably. If you do a little research and plan your menus in advance, you’ll be able to fuel your body in the best way possible.

Bedtime

Sleep is incredibly important for both your body and your mind. Your body uses your sleeping hours to rejuvenate itself: cell renewal, wound healing and muscle relaxation all take place during sleep. Your mind uses this time to process and make sense of what it’s taken in during the day, and also to unwind and make ready for the new day on the horizon. If you set a consistent bedtime and stick to it, as well as avoid using electronics before bedtime, you’ll sleep more soundly.

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Move Your Body

Whether your goals are to lose mass, tone your body, get fit or stay fit, exercise is imperative. Aside from any specialised exercise that you might need to do to reach specific goals, doing regular exercise like walking, dancing, yoga or aerobics will keep your body moving, keep the happy hormones coming and the toxins sweating out of your system.

Manage Stress Levels

Stress is the silent killer of health and wellness. While this may be a facet of managing your mental health, managing stress is a task all on its own. Learn what your triggers are (they may be a confrontation, lack of sleep, fear of abandonment or others) and figure out how to separate triggers from what’s happening in your life and manage how you actually feel about a given situation, not how your triggers may make you feel. Practice breathwork or even meditation to help take you out of stressful moments.

Wrap Up

If you use these habits in your everyday life, you’ll have no trouble reaching your health goals; whatever they are!