Daily healthy Habits are essential when you're feeling overwhelmed by stress. After a long day of work, school, children and whatever else life throws at us, it's tough to keep everything together. These habits don't just benefit your well-being today, but they will generally help you be healthier and happier in your daily life. Here are seven daily healthy habits that can help you manage stress.
1. Make Exercise A Part of Your Morning or Evening Ritual
Physical activity is an excellent strategy for relieving mental or physical stress. When you exercise and get your blood moving, you feel more energetic, enabling you to cope with stress better.
Exercise releases endorphins, which can boost your mood and help you feel better prepared to tackle stressful challenges.
And exercise clears your mind, which can help you think better about solutions to stressful problems you may have.
Here are some ways to get more movement into your day.
• Exercise first thing in the morning to start your day on a positive note and ensure you get your workout in each day.
• Take a walking lunch where you snack on portable, healthy foods while walking around the block or taking the stairs up and down at your office.
• Engage in sports or other activities you love to do.
• Join a club or group that enjoys the same activities as you, encouraging you to do it more.
• Try stretching each night just before bed to relax you and to help you sleep more soundly.
2. Listen to Music
Whatever type of music you like, you should listen to it frequently. Music can reduce blood pressure and lower your heart rate.
When you hear music, it begins to lower your stress hormone levels quickly and helps boost your mental and emotional health.
When you are feeling incredibly stressed, try listening to your favourite song to get a quick pick-me-up.
It is important to choose what you love, not what others tell you to love, for the effects to be genuine.
And if you love to sing, by all means, sing along, as this can help boost your mood and reduce your stress even more.
3. Drink Green Tea
When your stress is causing you to feel anxious or jumpy, reach for a green tea instead of coffee or something else.
Green tea is exceptionally high in antioxidants, which combat the effects of stress on the body and mind.
Drinking a hot mug of tea can also be a relaxing, rejuvenating experience because it gives you time to unwind and consider what is bothering you.
If you do not like tea, try drinking a green juice or smoothie filled with fresh fruits and vegetables, which are also high in antioxidants and plenty of other nutrients to help you combat the effects of a stressful day.
4. Do Less
We are often causing ourselves even more stress by over-committing our time and rushing about trying to fit too much into our busy lives.
Your packed calendar and busy list of obligations create more tension in your life than you probably realize.
When you notice that your to-do list causes you to panic, it is time for some changes.
Start with these simple steps.
1. Make a list of all your commitments, obligations, and tasks for one week. Next to each, place a brief explanation of why this is important to your life.
2. Rank these in terms of priority according to your goals and values.
3. Those that are not important or are not serving your needs should be delegated to others or eliminated.
4. Review your calendar every week for two months to determine which events and tasks can be cut back or stopped altogether to create more space in your schedule.
5. Get Your Worries Out
Always keep a small notebook with you. When you find yourself worrying about something or being plagued by anxiety, write down your thoughts.
Getting these out of your mind and onto paper is a helpful strategy for relieving your stress, and when you see the words written, you are better able to process them and see viable solutions.
Writing down your stressors helps you identify less important ones and have more energy to focus on the ones that present real challenges.
6. Accept That You Cannot Control everything.
One significant cause of stress for many people is fretting over or focusing on the things in your life over which you have little or no control or meditating on something that you can't change.
When you get stuck thinking about these aspects of life, your stress level rises, and you start thinking negatively about your ability to control your life.
If you want to reduce your stress, you need to learn to accept that life is chaotic and often out of your control and that the only thing you can influence is your reaction to it.
Accepting this reality can help you learn to shrug off a little of the worries that cause many people to stress and anxiety.
When something happens that is causing you stress, ask yourself these questions:
• Is there anything I can do to influence to outcome of this?
• What in this situation is within my control?
• In the long run, will it matter for my happiness or well-being?
• How will I choose positively to those people and events that are outside of my control?
7. Avoid processed sugars or intensely sugary foods.
Sugary foods are very temporary stress relievers, but they aren't good for your heart health in the long run. They can also cause weight gain if you're not watching how much sugar you eat each day.
Try to keep your diet to more portioned meals with lots of fruits and vegetables, moderate amounts of protein and lower carbohydrates. Try to avoid sugar and processed sugars because these spikes your energy initially but leave you feeling tired and groggy later.
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How to sustain these daily healthy habits
Habits are difficult at first, but the more you do these daily habits or activities that help lower stress in your life, the easier it is to continue. To make sure you stick with healthy habits:
1. Stand Up Straight
Slouching in a chair or on a couch means that your abs are not being used to support your back muscles, so it is more likely that you will feel the weight in your back or shoulders.
Stand up straight when doing activities that require more activity, like washing dishes or taking out the trash. This automatically engages your core to do some work, so you don't get back pain.
2. Learn Breathing Techniques
Breathing exercises can be useful to calm you down and help you process emotions like stress and anxiety. Breathing techniques like this one:
• Inhale through your nose and exhale out of your mouth.
To create a healthy habit that helps ease stress, take 15 minutes out of your day to sit quietly with the lights turned off or dimmed for a meditation session.
• Take 5 deep breaths, hold each one for a count of 10 and release it slowly (repeat this 4 times).
When you notice yourself feeling stressed, make sure to do these breathing exercises to help bring your stress level down.
3. Get A Massage
Massages are good for helping your body recover from strenuous workouts and are an effective way to manage stress.
It feels good to have someone else touch you in a soothing way that helps you connect with yourself and your body.
If you have the time and money for this kind of wellness treatment, make it a priority. The great thing about massages is they can help to relieve stress, increase your energy and reduce muscle pain.
4. Find yourself an accountability partner who is supportive of your goals
When you make healthy choices for yourself, it's easy to feel like you have no one else but you. If you have a friend who also is trying to find healthy ways of living their lives, try doing this activity together.
This can be helpful because it makes sure that both people are staying on track and not giving up on themselves. It can also be relaxing to have someone else there who understands what you're going through, especially if these daily healthy habits are new to them too.
5. Protect your sleep schedule
Getting enough sleep can be very important for both maintaining your mental health and physical health.
If you are having trouble sleeping, consider these tips to rest better:
• Go to bed at the same time every night. This will help your body get into a routine that will make it easier to sleep each night.
• Try to avoid caffeine afternoon. Caffeine is a stimulant that can keep your body active, but it also makes it harder to fall asleep at night because your body thinks that it's morning instead of bedtime.
• Take time to relax before bed. This could be taking a bath, reading or listening to soothing music for an hour before sleeping.
6. Find a hobby that you enjoy and spend some time doing it
Hobbies can be a great way to get away from stress and focus on something else for a while. Some examples of hobbies are drawing, painting, crafts, gardening or cooking. All of these activities help you clear your mind, so when you're done, you can be back with all your thoughts.
If none of these interests you, try finding or making up a hobby for yourself. You could take photos on the weekends or hike more often if you love being outside on the trails. This will help manage stress and increase your heart health and find time to disconnect from social media and other distractions.
7. Keep Going
If something interrupts your schedule at work or home, you can fall off track until the next day. Instead of feeling guilty about it, pick up where you left off and try again tomorrow.
Being productive and getting things done is important, but if you're stressed about it, you won't be as effective and efficient as you can be.
Final Thought on daily healthy habits to help manage stress
Stress can be difficult to deal with. It is important to take care of yourself to cope with the stressful events of your life. By sticking to a healthy diet, regular exercise and making time for yourself, it may be possible to decrease the amount of stress in your life. Remember
- Reducing stress is vital for protecting your physical, mental, and emotional health.
- While certain things in life cause stress that you cannot get rid of, there are ways to reduce your stress and control your response to stressful events.
- These daily habits are an excellent start for learning to manage your stress better.
If you enjoyed this article on daily healthy habits, please share it and if you have any questions or suggestions for future articles, post them in the comments section of this article. I look forward to hearing from you.
More Resources
The Importance of Creating Habits and Routine
Making health habitual: the psychology of ‘habit-formation’ and general practice