10-Minute Wellness Habits To Try For Better Health
Lately, I’ve been thinking about habits. How habits are made and how we break them. Both are equally important, or they can be. Our health and wellbeing is impacted by everything we do or choose not to do. As it turns out, the brain thrives on habit and seeks it out more than we may realize.
Have you ever found yourself getting hooked on something that you didn’t think was unhealthy until you noticed how it affected your mental and emotional health? How you react or respond emotionally to something you’re doing is a huge clue that’ll tell you if something is or isn’t benefiting you. Another clue is how we feel physically over time — if we’re feeling unknowingly drained or fatigued.
Habits can range from minorly self-destructive to majorly. Everything we do comes with a purpose and a consequence. For instance, say you’re scrolling on social media the moment you open your eyes in the morning because you think, if you don’t, you’ll miss something. Or, you’ll feel disconnected if you’re not constantly in tune with what your friends and family members are all up to. This is a habit, and you may think it’s a positive and healthy one.
For me, I’ve found that it’s much better and you feel much lighter not checking the Internet or social media right when the sun rises. The reason for this is, even though most posts can be positive and uplifting, you might stumble upon a post or a political rant or some form of news that immediately puts a damper on your day and mood. This habit wasn’t hard for me to break.
Changing your habits isn’t talked about enough. Knowing when we need a change is another thing. To change this behavior, at night, I’ve started turning my phone’s screen light off, turning down the volume and shutting off the vibration. Before going to bed, I’ll move my phone to the room where I write and do art everyday. I want it to be dead to me and vice versa. Now, I rise with the sun and start every day with thirty minutes of deep breathing meditations in utter silence.
They say it takes sixty days to secure a habit, make it a regular, second nature engagement. I’ve been doing this far more than sixty days as it’s become something I can’t not do each morning. Meditation helps me start my day on the right foot, whether it’s a day of relaxation or a workday. Science now shows that the more you incorporate down time or silence into your routine, the more productive and efficient you are in your professional and personal life.
Last night, I watched an interesting YouTube video about 10-minute habits that can change your health and life. I thought it was interesting in the sense that how we perceive time is usually wrong. We think, I’ll never have the time to meditate in the morning, afternoon or evening. Really, you can meditate for only ten minutes, and you’ll notice a major improvement with your mental and emotional health. Instead of filling your brain with garbage, these moments of silence will clear your mind of unnecessary stress and clutter, thus allowing you to be calmer and happier throughout the day.
Ten-minute habits, if we stick to them daily, you will see improvements with your health and overall wellbeing. You may find that simple but impactful actions don’t need to take more than ten minutes. This way of thinking will propel you to start integrating these habits into your daily life.
Final Thoughts
Habits and the things we do are much smaller than we initially perceive them to be. If a task takes ten minutes to do, there should be no reason not to do it. Being healthier or doing things for our health shouldn’t add to our stress, it should take away. Once you begin with one habit that affects how you feel overall, you’ll find yourself eager to keep bringing in new habits that have this transformational affect on your health.
You can meditate for ten minutes. You can do a simple Yoga stretching routine for ten minutes. You can cover a lot of ground cleaning or reorganizing in ten minutes. In retrospect, keep in mind that it’s not a matter of if habits are easy or hard to make or break. When something becomes routine, it becomes you won’t want to stop doing it.
