What are lifestyle choices? Lifestyle choices are the conscious decisions that we make in our day-to-day life that affect us both physically and mentally in a positive, and negative way. It revolves around creating or breaking habits so that you may lead a healthier, longer, and happier life.
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Benefits of changing your lifestyle choices
Improving your lifestyle choices will not only mean that you enhance your life physically and mentally, but you also have the ability to lower the risks of chronic and even mental illnesses. However, making “better decisions” and healthier choices isn’t always an easy task, especially if you are trying to break old “bad” habits that you have maybe lived with for years. It is never too late to change your lifestyle choices for the better, you just need somewhere to start, and a great place to do that is by evaluating where you are currently.
Conduct a review of your current lifestyle choices
Before fixing a problem, it is a good idea to know what the issue is. For example, you should have a look at what parts of your lifestyle you are not happy with or want to improve on. This could be anything from changing your diet to adding more exercise, or even a journey of self-discovery and reflection.
Decide why you want to improve your lifestyle choices
Once you have reviewed your current lifestyle choices and you know what you would like to change, you should set goals as to why you want to change them. Are you changing your diet to lose weight? To gain weight? To improve your gut health? To limit or add certain nutritional discrepancies within your body? When you know why you are changing your lifestyle, and when you set yourself reasonable goals, the likelihood of long-term change is dramatically increased.
Ways to improve your lifestyle choices
Here is a list of ways that many people try to implement into their lifestyle to improve it through the conscious choices that they make. All the following examples can start small and gradually be built upon, as well as the option of seeking professional help to better implement them into your current lifestyle.
#1 Changing your diet
A great place to start, and something that many people often strive to change without even knowing it is a lifestyle choice is their diet. Your diet can have a huge impact on many aspects of your life including (but not limited to) your weight, growth, gut health, critical thinking and brain functionality, energy levels, fitness, and overall health.
Several ways for you to incorporate diet changes within your lifestyle would be, for example, eating more fruits and vegetables, buying less processed products or products with refined sugars in them, snacking less, figuring out your own specific bodily needs, and creating a weekly meal prep plan that gives you the right amount of nutrients required.
When making lifestyle changes to your diet you don’t need to be all or nothing. In fact, you will be much more likely to stick to any changes that you implement into your diet if you take small and easily accomplishable steps, rather than trying to overhaul many years of your current diet routine overnight. If you struggle with your diet or don’t know where to start you can always speak to a professional such as a nutritionist, diet coach, or physical trainer to get you started on the right track.
#2 Adding supplements
Sometimes changing your diet alone is not enough to give you the lifestyle improvements that you are looking for. Your body might just be naturally deficient in certain minerals, you might have allergies to certain foods which then reduces your intake of said minerals, or maybe you have complicated dietary requirements or even religious/ethical choices on not eating certain foods. This is where adding supplements comes in to help give your body that extra boost.
There are many different types of supplements that you can buy, for a variety of reasons. For example, you could buy alpha gpc to help with improving your neural communication and cognitive function, Omega 3 capsules to prevent heart disease and strokes, magnesium to support the body’s nerve and muscle functions, Vitamin C to help protect your cells and maintain healthy bones, skin and blood vessels.
The list goes on and on, and it can be overwhelming or even impossible to know what to take, how much, and how often, so it is always advisable to speak to your doctor or other such professional before adding any extra supplements to your lifestyle choices, just to make sure you are taking what your body needs
#3 Doing some exercise
Another lifestyle choice that people often strive to add to their day-to-day life is exercise. For some people, this will come naturally and easily by walking or cycling to work, or for another example maybe their work is an active job, such as within construction, forestry, or even warehouse work. Others who perhaps commute to work via car and then have sedentary jobs sitting at desks or in meetings, however, may find it a little harder to add to their day.
The benefits of choosing to add exercise into your lifestyle are vast, including increased energy, becoming physically fitter, improved heart and lung health along with better moods, and often because of the extra movement less general pain trapped within your body.
When people think of exercising one of the things that will put them off is comparing themselves to what others do or setting unrealistic expectations. But in reality, you don’t need to start by going to a gym 7 days a week for an hour a day. You can start improving your lifestyle choices by just doing something as small as going for a 20-minute walk on your lunch break instead of sitting around.
#4 Practicing mindfulness
It is all too common to get wrapped up in the stress of life, with achieving your personal and financial goals, where you are headed, and how things will turn out. Forgetting to enjoy what you have already.
Something anyone can add to their lifestyle to combat this constant state of stress is practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness is the ability to ground yourself and be able to become fully present and aware of your situation and surroundings, what you are doing, where you are, who you are with, remaining calm, and not letting whatever is going on around you to affect or overwhelm you.
Many benefits of adding mindfulness into your lifestyle can include the reduction of stress, having a better understanding of yourself, enhancing both your physical and mental performance, as well as becoming more in tune with those around you.
The main way to add more mindfulness to your lifestyle is through meditation, and the best part about it is that you can meditate for as long or as short of a time as you like. You can for example just stop whatever you are doing for a few seconds or minutes, close your eyes and just try to clear your mind. Other ways include visiting classes, joining online mindfulness sessions, or even just following along at home with videos you can find on the internet.
#5 Socializing with the right people
Humans are social animals, and generally prefer to not be or feel alone. A positive lifestyle choice that you can make is to surround yourself with people that you love and that support you or boost your quality of life.
Not only can these people hugely affect your mood, but also the direction of your life and choices. If you are surrounded by negative people who always put you down, you are going to be less likely to succeed or even try to accomplish the things that you want to do. Whereas if you can find people on the same wavelength as you then everything in life can seem less of a struggle and much more achievable. However, this doesn’t mean you should instantly cut everyone out of your life if they have problems, different points of view, or disagree with you.
#6 Removing your bad habits
Not only is it important to add positive changes to your lifestyle, but also to be aware of, reduce and/or remove the negative ones. The problem that most people will face with removing negative lifestyle choices is that they are most often there as comfort or stress relief. The two biggest culprits are smoking and drinking excessively. Luckily just as there are many ways to seek professional help with adding positive lifestyle changes into your life, there is also professional help to aid you in removing the negative ones as well. When removing negatives from your life you are by default improving your lifestyle choices.
There are many other things you can do to try and improve your lifestyle choices, such as drinking more water, loving yourself more, working on your sleep schedule, and reducing your screen time. But for now, why not try implementing one of the examples shown above?