If you’re not in the best shape of your life, my question to you is—why not? Is there really something more valuable to you than your own body and mind?
Chances are, if you lost your good health, you’d do everything in your power and spend any amount of money to get it back. It only makes sense to protect whatever health you have today and make the necessary investments to keep it for as long as possible.
Maybe you know all this but you’ve told yourself that you have other priorities right now, that you’ll focus on your health once this particular storm has passed.
When it comes to health, the most important principle is to have a lifestyle you stick with through every season and emotional state of life.
Start Cultivating Habits Now
If I have your attention so far, let me encourage you to make a plan and get started now—not later today or tomorrow. Do something right now. Make a deposit into the bank account of your own health. Below are some habits that form the foundation of my approach to health, and I believe they are a great place for anyone to begin.
1. Move Your Body–a Lot
Getting regular physical activity is the most important thing you can do for your health. A narrative review in the Canadian Medical Association Journal claimed that we now have “irrefutable evidence” that regular exercise helps prevent chronic diseases.
Don’t worry about which exercise is ideal or how to maximize your routine’s effectiveness until you’ve mastered the habit of moving your body in a significant way every day. It’s important to find something you enjoy and look forward to doing. Experiment to figure out what that is.
2. Eat Real Food
There’s a lot that experts disagree about in the field of nutrition, and there’s more we still don’t know. But that doesn’t mean we’re completely in the dark about what we should put in our bodies. According to a systematic review of observational studies in the British Journal of Nutrition, the highest levels of consumption of ultra-processed foods were significantly correlated with conditions you’d want to avoid: obesity, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular diseases.
Simple logic tells us there’s very little risk in limiting how much food we eat and that it can only have an upside. You don’t need to reinvent yourself to reap the benefits. Simply replace some of the junk food you eat with healthier real food options.
3. Get Enough Sleep
A review in the Annual Review of Psychology starts with, “Sleep has a critical role in promoting health,” and it explains how sleep disturbances are linked to several major medical illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, and depression.
While sleep isn’t something you can control to the same extent as your diet and exercise, there are still decisions you can make to stack the odds in your favor. Most are common sense, so the magic isn’t in the knowledge but in creating good nighttime habits:
- Go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time each day.
- Get off your phone and other screens at least one hour before bed.
- Consider a warm (not hot) bath or shower followed by reading a book in bed.
- Create an enticing evening routine.
4. Choose Happy
I believe happiness and stress are things people choose more than they realize. As states of mind, the two are influenced more by your mental beliefs and attitudes than by what’s happening around you. Think of the difference between how you feel about a challenge you choose to take on and how you feel about one that is imposed on you. Two similar situations may inspire a completely different mental state based on your perceptions.
Stress, according to a research article in Future Science OA, isn’t just a nuisance. Through chemical mediators in your body, chronic stress can negatively affect your brain structure and immune system. It’s the body’s equivalent of running your engine too hard for too long.
For me, the best way to avoid stress is to displace it with activities I enjoy and things that make me happy. Cultivate good friendships, make real progress on something you care about, and plan experiences that you look forward to. When it comes to our health, cultivating new habits adds up and puts us on a trajectory of ongoing success.