You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine – John C Maxwell.
When our lives get busy, we tend to focus less on ourselves and more on simply getting through the day. Unless we take the time and effort to integrate chunks of time to nourish ourselves, we’ll suffer both physically and mentally. By taking a few minutes to sprinkle self care rituals throughout our day, we’ll be more physically and mentally attuned. That, in turn, will make us more productive.
Here are seven self care rituals to incorporate into your daily routine for optimized health and wellbeing.
Daily Innovation
Unproductive people often spend a lot of time daydreaming rather than actually doing. However, thinking about stuff is an important part of being super productive. It can lead to new creative and innovative ways of doing tasks that makes them more efficient.
The key is to structure time for daily innovative thinking. So, block in a 30 minute period each day where you think about your goals, tasks and procedures. Let your brain play with original concepts. Make the time unstructured and experimental. It should feel like a break from work that rejuvenates your mind. It will provide an outlet for your energy without slowing down your momentum. In addition, explore innovation like bodybuilding apps and other technology for your mobile phone.
Morning Phone Bans
Apps are great, but the majority of people immediately reach for their phone when they wake up. They then spend about half an hour checking through their social media. That thirty minutes usually dictates the rest of their day.
Being tied to your phone is not good for your psyche. Keep it out of your bedroom and out of your early morning routine. Spend that first half hour thinking about your goals for the day and exactly what you need to so that when you come to bed at night you feel great about how productive you have been. Use that vital early morning time to boost your productivity.
Power Naps
Research has shown that taking a power nap can be a powerful performance booster. A short nap of between ten and twenty five minutes has been shown as the ideal period to rejuvenate the mind and body. Sleeping for less than 30 minutes prevents the body from entering into a state of deep sleep. That is why you feel so energized rather than groggy when you wake up.
Movement
You know that exercise should be a part of your daily routine. The challenge, of course, is to find the time and then to summon up the motivation. The key is to get started moving in micro amounts. After an hour of sitting, get up, walk around and stretch for two minutes. When you’re watching TV, get down on the floor during the ad breaks and pump out a dozen push ups, hold the plank for the duration of a commercial and then finish off with 10 star jumps.
About an hour after your evening meal, take a 15 minute walk around your neighborhood. Use this time to breath in fresh air, unwind from the day and share in meaningful communication with your loved ones.
Body Position Changes
Sitting at a desk all day is problematic for your body’s ergonomics and for your productivity. In fact, it will make you drowsy and uncomfortable. Get into the habit of being ergonomically flexible. Sit for the first hour then do your work standing at a desk for the next hour. Take regular walk breaks and, if you can, get that ten minute nap in some time where you are actually lying down. This posture diversification will help to relieve physical and mental fatigue, providing a fresh burst of energy.
Massage
Few things are as rejuvenating as a deep tissue massage. Now, with the availability of quality tools like Pso Rite Massagers, you can give yourself a soothing massage whenever you like.
Once you get back from your short evening walk, taking a warm bath and then giving yourself a massage will set you up beautifully for a great night’s sleep.
A part of the body that gets a beating as we go about our lives is the psoas muscles. These muscles run through the hips and serve as key connectors between the pelvic region and the upper and lower body. Incorporating the daily ritual of releasing the tension that has built up in the psoas muscles through a massage tool like the Pso Rite massager will do wonders for your posture, mobility and lower back health. In fact, massage may even help with issues like hypertension.
Deep Nasal Breathing
When you are at work and you are stressed out or your mind is filled with negative thoughts, you will have a tendency to procrastinate. When the negative thoughts start to dominate your brain, that is the time that you need an intervention to allow you to take back control.
A powerful technique to allow you to take back control and achieve the emotional balance that you need is deep nasal breathing. It emotionally stabilizes the brain, improves mental strength, and can help you to overcome anxiety. As a result, you are able to improve your productivity and maintain your emotional balance. When you practice deep nasal breathing the mind becomes peaceful. It provides the trigger to allow us to switch off the negative thoughts and focus on calming thoughts.
When you combine deep nasal breathing with a desire to eradicate your mind of negative thoughts and emotions you will have discovered a powerful tool to maintain emotional balance.
In learning to breathe again, you will be consciously thinking about your breathing – perhaps for the first time in your life. After a while, though, you’ll no longer have to think about it. Deep breathing will become habitual. Until then, however, you will need to consciously make the effort to breathe the correct way. You won’t be breathing properly with every breath straight away and you shouldn’t expect to.
Start by taking in deep breaths for 20 seconds every hour. Slowly increase until you are doing it for a minute at a time. After a week, you’ll be up to 5 or 6 minutes every hour. At the end of 3 months, the old ineffective way of getting oxygen into your system will be a thing of the past. Your body will no longer be sputtering down the road on half a cylinder – you’ll be cruising along on all 4 cylinders, with the hood down and the wind blowing through your hair!
Bottom Line
Start integrating our seven self care rituals into your life one at a time, over the next few weeks. In addition to getting more out of your workouts, you’ll have a more fulfilling life. Healthy living even counteracts stressors and depression, for an anti-aging effect. You’ll find that you can get fit, even if you don’t lift weights. As you add each ritual, take note of how much better you feel – and how much more proactive you – are as a result.
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