Are you leading a perfect life of health and wellness?
No, probably not—and we wouldn’t expect you to be.
There will forever be new mindsets, practices, habits, and improvements to consider that could nudge you toward a slightly healthier life.
If you tried to implement all of them, your overall wellness would plummet and life wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.
Can you achieve your wellness goals without overwhelming yourself and upending your current lifestyle? Yes, you can! Let’s explore a few real tips you can try out today (or tomorrow, seriously, no pressure.)
1. Minimize to Maximize
There are days—maybe every day—when we wish we had more than 24 hours to accomplish everything we wanted to. We can’t bend and warp time, but we can choose to use it wisely and restructure our day to include wellness practices.
Put simply, when you minimize one thing, you create the opportunity to maximize another. According to eMarketer, US adults spend nearly 4 hours per day on mobile devices.
If this is you, imagine reducing this to 3 hours per day and suddenly freeing up an entire hour to spend achieving your wellness goals.
In one hour, you could realistically complete a 30-minute yoga session, take a 10-minute midday walk around your house or office, and spend 20 minutes reading a captivating novel before bed.
4 hours per day accumulates to 28 hours per week, over one full day spent mindlessly scrolling through content and apps on a screen. Can you minimize screen time to maximize wellness time?
This concept applies not just to smartphone usage, but to every activity in your life. Where can you cut down on time to free up time elsewhere for your wellness goals? Maybe, just maybe, 24 hours is all we needed, after all.
2. Put Money On It
How can you leverage the ideas of value and accountability to help you achieve your wellness goals?
As humans, we subconsciously place value on things—physical items, friendships, and even the time we spend doing something we view as either being valuable or wasting time.
You might lose a $5 pair of sunglasses every couple of weeks and hardly notice as your investment was minimal. If you instead purchased a $100 pair of sunglasses, then you might hold yourself accountable to not losing them as they have greater value to you.
Team up with a friend and share your most meaningful wellness goal with them. Let’s say your goal is to exercise four times per week.
Now, pick a sum of money. It doesn’t have to be excessive, but it can’t be inconsequential, either. Create an agreement that if you fail to exercise four times per week, you now have to give your friend this sum of money.
Not only does this initiate a fun game between you and a friend, it generates powerful value and accountability around achieving the goal you set forth for yourself. Stick with this goal long enough and you’ll turn it into a long-lasting habit.
Those texts from your friend checking in to see if they're making money from you this week? Free motivation!
3. Dream Big, But Start Small
One study cited in a Harvard Business review article found that just 19% of the people who created goals for the year ahead achieved those goals two years later.
Goal setting is hugely impactful, but considering how you design your wellness goals greatly determines your chances of achieving them.
It’s never wrong to dream big and seek out a life of total health and wellness. By starting small, however, you allow yourself to gradually introduce health and wellness practices into you day-to-day.
If your goal is to lose 15 pounds, it would be daunting and unrealistic to do that in one month. What if instead, you broke this goal up into losing 3 pounds per month over 5 months? Now, your focus is on 3 pounds in one month and suddenly, one terrifying goal has been transformed into 5 goals you can readily work on.
If your goal is to feel less stressed throughout the week, you wouldn’t simply quit your job and escape to a luxury spa, right? What if instead, you wrote small self-care activities into your calendar?
Can you make time for a hot, soothing bath on Tuesday evening? Can you take a book outside for a midday break on Thursday? Can you make relaxing plans on Friday after work to look forward to?
Start small, then slowly expand, writing bigger and better goals and setting aside ample time to achieve them.
4. Simplify Your Nutrition
To instantly have more sustained energy, feel healthier, and think more clearly, assess your food and water intake and start making smart adjustments.
Your diet significantly impacts your total wellness, perhaps more than any other factor, and aids you in achieving every wellness goal you set forth.
The National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine recommends that adult men drink 125 ounces of water per day and adult women drink 91 ounces. Are you nowhere near these numbers? You can achieve a better state of health and wellness right now just by drinking more water today and every day.
Are you regularly eating a balanced diet packed with a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables and healthy sources of protein and carbs?
If you want to consume healthier meals throughout the week, but don’t have spare time to consider how, simplify a few of your lunches and snacks each week by sipping on a ready-to-drink Soylent.
In fact, the founders of Soylent were a busy working team who wanted to consume better nutrition without sacrificing more time to do so. This idea alone was a catalyst for putting complete nutrition in a bottle.
Yes, You Can
Wellness is not binary. It’s not black or white and it can’t be switched on or off. It’s an ongoing process consisting of small, intentional changes that accumulate to a healthier life.
We hope you can immediately benefit from these four tips and use them to achieve your wellness goals. Excuse us for now, we’re going for a midday walk, and getting another cup of water while we’re at it!
Stay happy, stay healthy,
- The Soylent Team
