Four easy ways to help you feel like your life isn’t set on “repeat.”
We all have those moments, when life seems set to loop. Get up. Rush to breakfast. Rush to get ready for work. Rush to get work, and the myriad of other “rush” things everyday life requires. Like your workout, life sometimes needs a little mixing up, in order to give it a kick start. I like to think of it as cardio for your soul.
Try some of these ideas to get yourself mentally out of your everyday activities. Yes, we would all love to travel to Nepal, and explore the meaning of life. When your days are full of freeways, meetings, and status reports, you need to squeeze some “om” into your life, which doesn’t require a transcontinental flight.
- Go To Bed Earlier
Sometimes you feel the need to stay up an extra hour or two Netflixing away. Those late night hours seem as our only time to unwind. Don’t do it. Do the opposite, go to sleep early. Getting a good night’s sleep has numerous health benefits such as improving memory, learning, physical performance, maintaining healthy weight, curbing inflammation, spurring creativity, sharpening attention, lowering stress, avoiding accidents, decreasing anxiety, and living longer.
Yes, so many benefits by hitting the sack early. Instead of waking up with heavy lids on a weekday, imagine waking up before your alarm goes off. Your body is ready to start to the day, because it’s had time to recharge, and run on all cylinders.
- Wake Up Earlier
If you go to bed earlier, your body will naturally get up earlier. Imagine waking up feeling like it’s a Sunday, and brunch is the first thing on your agenda? You can have the same feeling of peace before every work day, by creating more time in your day.
You’ll be able to make a healthy breakfast. You can exercise or go for a walk in the neighborhood. You can relax, and calmly make your to do list for the day. You’ll be more productive, and a good night’s sleep will become a regular part of your life. Nothing worse than the stress of those 10 minutes of being late to work.
- Take A Lunch Break
Fewer American workers are taking time for lunch. Research shows that only 1 in 5 five people steps away for their midday meal. Digital life has so many ways of connecting, pings, and inboxes to check, you’ll never reach the end. Instead, unplug and give your body and brain a chance to recharge. You’ll be more productive by stepping away from your computer.
"Staying inside, in the same location, is really detrimental to creative thinking. It's also detrimental to doing that rumination that's needed for ideas to percolate and gestate and allow a person to arrive at an 'aha' moment,” says Kimberly Elsbach, a professor at the University of California, Davis Graduate School of Management, who studies workplace psychology.
Visit the outdoors, and give your mind a chance to have a new perspective. You might think of it as wasted time, but in reality, your mind will work better by letting it relax. All those emails and voicemails will be there when you come back to your desk.
- Make Meditation A Part Of Your Life
Reduce your stress levels and anxiety; improve your creativity, focus, and relationships by regularly meditating. Don’t think you need to have a zen garden with the incense sticks burning. Meditating is easy as spending 10 minutes a day, using apps like Headspace, to help center ourselves regularly.
Meditation helps your brain physically change, even if you’re not aware of it re-shaping itself. People with clinical levels of anxiety have experienced 90% reductions in anxiety. Meditation promotes ‘divergent thinking’ a type of thinking that allows many new ideas to be generated.
Also, researchers have found, compared with the people who didn’t meditate, ‘those trained in meditation stayed on tasks longer and made fewer task switches’. Lastly, meditation can improve relationships with everyone you meet. You become more comfortable with yourself, which makes it easier for others to get on with you.
We inundate ourselves with our friends’ lives, the news, and cat videos, when we can be helping our brains and bodies rejuvenate. If you don’t help your “self,” how can you truly experience all the benefits exercising and healthy eating. It’s all a matter of being in alignment with oneself. Carve out time for yourself, and your body will thank you accordingly.
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