Three Tips to Upgrade Your Life While Single
Shake up your physical environment, food and exercise routine
This year has been unique and created some enormous challenges for those of us that live alone and are single. It has created pressure on both physical and mental health, which are inextricably linked.
It is easy to feel marginalised or disconnected when single in a world filled with families and large friendship groups, and this year has left us more disconnected than ever. As a single person, it is important to take time for yourself. Don’t just throw yourself into work and forget about your own mental health; it will have negative long-term consequences.
Take time to improve your physical environment
My approach to improving mental health has mainly focused on improving my quality of life through small incremental improvements to my environment. These are small projects that could be completed in a few hours that would have outsized improvements over the long-run.
One of the easiest projects that you can start with today is walking around the house with a screwdriver for 10 minutes. All of those little things that wobble can be tightened quickly and they all improve your home environment.
Bigger projects take more time, but can still be easily completed in a few hours. Some examples of my projects this year:
- Upgrade my garden area with new lighting
- Paint my garden fence with a coloured paint
- Update some electrical outlets with USB sockets
- Tidy up my home cinema set up with cable boxes and better cable management
- Marie-kondo my clothes
- Re-arrange my hallway to be more functional through removing furniture
- Update my in-home network with a new core switch
- Re-seal a leaking roof in my garden shed
- Replace my bedroom curtains with better blackout curtains and a new curtain pole
- Change the radiator valve to be an automatic bleed valve on the one radiator that fills with air
These may seem relatively minor, but they are incremental improvements that make my environment better and improve my quality of life. They are small pieces of work that have outsized benefits to me.
The ideal choice for one of these is where I can change a process in my life that means it will take me less time in the future, bring an underutilised asset into use or remove a process entirely. These small incremental improvements can act to reduce stressors in your life, increase happiness and declutter your mind.
Food is more important than you think, invest time in improving it
The act of eating is definitely harder when you are single, it feels like everything you buy is designed for two people or a family of four. This has improved in recent years, but it still means that you need to work on a strategy to manage food and avoid wasting half of what you buy (or overeating).
It is easy to just eat junk, order takeout or go for convenience over quality when cooking for one. This isn’t a great long-term strategy though, and some simple improvements can make a big difference.
It isn’t difficult to improve the quality of your food, but it takes a bit of personal investment to do so.
My suggestion is to start by focusing on breakfast, it sets you up for the entire day and is usually the meal that people skip or eat the same thing every day. I started this year by eating popcorn and peperami for breakfast, which was awful and I don’t know how I got into that bad habit.
Here’s how to improve it:
- Set a calorie goal for breakfast, mine is 650. Many people don’t eat enough for breakfast, 2 slices of toast are only about 250 calories. No wonder you are hungry by 11 am.
- Look for items that you can prepare in advance or are simple to prepare. Ideally, breakfast shouldn’t take more than 10–15 minutes to prepare.
- Consider swapping out items that go out of date before you can use them entirely. I swapped milk for unsweetened almond milk; it is significantly lower in calories and I enjoy the taste.
- Different breakfast elements may give you the flexibility to swap items around or even eat breakfast in two parts, if you get hungry a few hours after breakfast, then plan for it! Lean into your inner hobbit, second breakfast is a legitimate strategy.
My breakfast now consists of two parts. I make overnight oats with 50g of oats, 20g of dried fruit and 250ml of unsweetened almond milk. I then follow that up with two slices of toast, two eggs, serrano ham and tomato salsa for a total of 635 calories. I eat this every day and play around with some elements like the dried fruit.
With other meals, look to put a strategy in place to make them easiest to prepare. I use a vacuum pack machine to cook batches of food and freeze them in portions. Reheating them is much quicker than ordering takeout and it has inbuilt portion control.
Also, spend some time improving your cooking ability. A small amount of investment will revolutionise your ability to cook.
Eating better will make you feel better, make it easier to train and provide long-term health gains.
Plan a fitness routine and don’t be afraid to shake it up
Exercising alone can feel like a chore, but don’t underestimate its value. I find that it helps give me time to decompress after a day at work, particularly during this era of remote working. Once you get on the gain train, it can be particularly motivating as well.
This year I have mainly focused on losing weight, I started the year at 266 pounds and I am currently 205. I did this by focusing on what I ate, as well as increasing the amount of exercise each week. My routine in 2019 was typically 3–4 gym sessions per week, this year I have increased that to 4–5 exercise sessions.
When the lockdown hit, I needed to change my routine significantly. I had previously focused on CrossFit style workouts and the online sessions that my gym organised didn’t motivate me to the same extent.
I ended up adding running to my routine, something I had not previously considered. My aim was to add a 45 minute run to my overall routine to maintain the calorie burn that I had seen at the gym.
The addition of running to my routine also gave me a new metric to focus on, my VO2 Max.
Through continuing to build this over the year, it has improved my fitness and recovery from exercise. Tracking it through an app has made this metric that would normally be an “I feel fitter” into an “I can see the improvement” outcome.
Being single at the moment can be taxing on both your physical and mental health, especially when you are not able to see friends and go about your normal life.
Through taking simple steps to improve your physical environment, food and exercise routines, you can really upgrade your life.
