Aiming to lead a healthy life can feel challenging and overwhelming at times — how can we manage working, exercising, maintaining healthy social connections, having time for ourselves, and rest all at once? Well, we’re bringing you 8 wellness recommendations to help guide you towards this holistic balance, step by step!
#1 Eating Healthy
While there’s an ongoing consensus among people that healthy nutrition means exclusively eating salads, a balanced meal that provides you with a range of essential nutrients can vary and serve different palates too! Healthy eating means enjoying a massive range of goodies, between fruits, legumes, lean protein, healthy fats, and dairy products. Ever tried cooking a butter chicken recipe without butter at all? Or a gooey vegan, gluten-free brownie that doesn’t spare the sweetness?
The culinary world is a mine for creativity, allowing you to switch items according to your taste buds and physical needs. Even switching a store-bought salad dressing for a homemade one can make a yummy and healthy difference! Not to mention, if healthy eating is a route to achieving a certain physical goal, it’s better if you refer to a health professional such as a nutritionist or dietitian, to provide you with the right support and guidance.
#2 Getting Physical
Exercising regularly is all about introducing some healthy movement into your day. If the gym isn’t really your scene, that’s no problem. You can start slowly. You might take a walk in the park during a chill breezy night, enroll in a dance class, or stroll to the closest dog park to drown in some doggy cuteness! The holistic benefits of being physically active are numerous, be it relieving stress, maintaining a healthy weight, boosting our energy and mood levels, or reducing risks of chronic illnesses. Don’t forget to refer to your medical practitioner to ensure that your exercises are safe and won’t have potential health risks!
#3 Staying Hydrated
Did you know that even in the nicest climate, about 3 liters of water a day is essential for our bodies to function properly? The water you drink doesn’t have to be boring; you can enjoy it with some minty leaves and cucumber slices, or you could pair your water with some ice cubes, add the orange peel you were about to throw away, and some basil leaves, and drink away! Staying hydrated can be so underrated sometimes, but it’s not just blissful for our skin as you might initially think — it’s also proved to be helpful for cognitive function!
#4 Communicating and Expressing Your Feelings
Recognizing and confronting our emotions in a healthy manner is crucial for our holistic wellbeing, so how can we ensure a healthy method of communicating our feelings? We can start by identifying the positive and negative emotions we’re feeling without shame, but rather by embracing them with compassion towards ourselves, and processing them. It’s essential that we understand that all of our emotions play a key part in our pursuit of wellness. Journaling can be a great way to express our feelings privately, without worrying about how we’re being perceived or judged for it!
#5 Practicing Self-Affirmation
Our feelings are valid, our situations are complicated, and not everything passes as smoothly as a knife through soft butter, but do you know how things can get better? Write your positive thoughts down! If you can’t think of something at the moment, write something sweet you wish someone would tell you, then place it wherever you spend the most time, be it on your phone as a reminder, in your bedroom, or even on your night stand.
The more we believe in these words, the more likely we are to believe in ourselves, and our abilities. This can help us confront our unpleasant experiences, process them, and live one more day to inspire us as we go through the next one. Pair your faith in yourself with an action, and you might just surprise yourself with your own power!
#6 Engaging in Social Activities
Being an active person socially doesn’t necessarily mean hitting up the club every night, or gliding from one social gathering to the next. There are an endless amount of ways we can establish, or maintain social connections that nurture us, and can even boost our mental health. Consider volunteering, for example. The special thing about volunteering is that not only would it be a great way of doing our part for the community, or even partaking in inspiring goodness, it can also be a pathway to making connections, meeting new people everyday, and exchanging love and support from all the people we’d encounter through volunteering.
#7 Exploring Mindfulness
Practicing mindfulness can be done through meditating, but we can also practice mindfulness by recognizing the here and now. It’s really as simple as acknowledging and appreciating our presence and everything that surrounds us, or in other words, being aware of our current feelings, and allowing ourselves to be unbothered by the past and the future. You can practice mindfulness through yoga, Tai Chi, and meditation too! What makes mindfulness worthwhile, you ask? For one it can actively help reduce risk of mental health complications such as stress, anxiety, and depression and increase your overall happiness!
#8 Prioritizing Sleep
The value of prioritizing maintaining a healthy sleeping pattern can be underestimated. While setting a nice and proper ambience for a good night’s rest can feel a little bit forced at first, establishing healthy sleeping habits might be just what our bodies need to excel! Do you know what 7 hours or more of good quality sleep can do to our wellbeing as adults? It can help elevate our mood, promote better cognitive functions, and help lower our risks against chronic illnesses, such as cardiovascular diseases, Type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure.
The one wellness recommendation that we’ll urge you to remember above all else though, is not to overwhelm yourself with all of the wellness tips mentioned above. Keeping up with our life’s tribulations, while leading a healthy lifestyle is a challenge, yes, but a nice way to break the cycle is to recognize that even if we manage to cover just one tip, that’s still a step forward in the right direction and it’s important that we appreciate that about ourselves.
Get started with Holisticly today, and book a life-changing session with Holisticly’s team of internationally renowned experts! They’re excited to meet you and help you get introduced with the best version of yourself!