5 Daily Practices To FEEL At Your Best
The tagline for Fitness Studio 46 is that we help busy people to Look, Move & FEEL better.
But it’s that final piece… The Feeling Better… that I really wanted to focus on today.
All of us want to feel at our best.
Being energised
Being in a great mood
Feeling fit & healthy
There are plenty of articles online that track the habits of successful people, and you’ll notice many similarities in all of them.
I’m going to share the 5 most effective practices I’ve identified from helping busy people, like you and I, feel at their best!
1) High quality sleep
The secret to feeling better in the day... is to look at the night before.
Are you getting high quality sleep?
It doesn’t take a genius to identify that poor sleep is going to have a negative effect on the following day.
And consistently poor sleep is going to have a negative effect on your life!
(If you refer back to the podcast / article ‘Is sleep really that important?’ I gave a detailed breakdown on some of the harmful effects that a lack of sleep)
But… In a nutshell It’s going to effect our:
Body composition
Health
Performance, including our work and home lives.
The importance of sleep can’t be over emphasised here…
If you want to feel better… Our top priority should be getting high quality sleep.
How do we do that?
Let’s look at 3 areas:
Sleep Behaviours
We firstly need to build good routines and behaviours around our sleep.
2 great questions to answer on the topic of sleep behaviours are:
- Do you have a consistent sleep / wake time?
- Do you have a pre-bed routine?
We are creatures of habit and body thrives on consistent routines and signals.
Having a pre-bed routine will teach your body that it’s time to wind down, which will make falling asleep a lot easier, rather than staring at the ceiling and counting sheep.
Doing this at consistent times everyday, including weekends where possible, is going to help maintain your bodies circadian rhythm, which impacts our energy and alertness throughout the day!
My advice is to be intentional about this process.
Set consistent times and have a pre-bed ritual.
Sleep Environment
We want to make sure we have an environment to promote good sleep.
This is going to include having a cool room, to stop us overheating and sweating in the night.
As well as a completely dark room.
I’d also add to that list, making sure you have a comfortable bed and pillow to promote good sleep.
Avoid Sleep distractions
I believe the most common sleep distraction is technology.
Make sure that you aren’t leaving a TV on whilst trying to sleep and that your phone isn’t going to disturb you.
The light from our screens is going to affect our ability to sleep.
But also the distractions that come along with these devices.
We’ve all checked emails that we wish we didn’t see or seen some news that has robbed us of good sleep.
I suggest doing an audit and trying to identify the most common sleep disturbances for you… this may or may not involve sending your partner to the spare room.
2) Drink Water
Many of us walk around in a state of dehydration every day.
When sleeping, we’re actually getting dehydrated.
But rather than water… we go straight for the coffee (because we’re still tired from our poor nights sleep)
However we want to be drinking water, early in the day in order to get ourselves hydrated as soon as possible after waking.
A good practice is to drink a glass / 2 first thing.
The key here is to be proactive with water intake…
Waiting until we feel thirsty before we have any water means that we’re already dehydrated.
We want to be drinking throughout the day in order to stay mentally sharp, avoid headaches and have better energy levels.
My top tip is to carry a water bottle and have it visible, perhaps on your desk at work, so you’re always reminded to drink throughout the day.
This will have a knock on effect to our health and fitness.
Adequate hydration helps to regulate hunger signals as well as improve our workouts.
We had a client who was working on drinking more water…
So she printed off a hydration sheet that she coloured in at her desk everytime she drank a glass of water.
Whatever it may look like, find a system that encourages you drink more water everyday.
3) Spend Time Outdoors
There are many benefits to getting outside, especially for our mental health & seeing nature.
But we’re going to look at 2 specific benefits.
Vitamin D exposure.
It’s nicknamed The sunshine vitamin for a reason.
Exposing our skin directly to sunlight produces vitamin D in the body.
There are many benefits to vitamin D.
Including:
The prevention of certain diseases
Improved mood
Absorption of calcium for healthy bones, teeth and muscles
As a society, especially in the UK, we spend far too much time indoors.
Making an effort to go outside and get some sunlight (weather dependent) is a very good idea.
(For more information on Vitamin D check the podcast / article supplements)
2. Light exposure.
One function of light exposure is that it helps our body to produce serotonin.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that perfroms many functions in the human body.
It’s nicknamed the happy hormone because it has a major role in our mood.
If we spend too much time inside, exposed to low levels of light, we won’t produce enough serotonin…
This will have a direct impact on our mood, alertness and levels of fatigue.
And…
Low levels of serotonin throughout the day will affect other hormones too.
This can then contribute to poor sleep!
(which as we said is a major factor to feeling at your best each day)
Getting outside daily, whether its for our morning coffee or to do some exercise is a great practice to introduce.
4) Exercise / Train
Speaking of exercise… this is another daily practice to have you feeling at your best.
Exercise is a form of overall stress relief and also produces feel good hormones such as serotonin, which as we just said will eventually contribute to better hormone regulation and better sleep.
I get to train people daily and witness first hand the effect a workout has on how somebody feels.
They may turn up for a session having had a terrible day.
Stress at work
Stress at home
Tired and fed up.
But they always leave the workout feeling so much better.
There are many physiological reasons as to why exercise makes us feel better.
But I particularly notice that for our busy clients … it’s just taking an hour for themselves.
Time to focus on becoming the best version of themselves. Away form their phones. Away from work. Away from home.
The ability to hit the reset button.
It doesn’t even need to be a massive workout.
The goal should be to move our bodies daily.
Ultimately, regularly moving and training will have compounding effects on our health and how we look too.
The list of benefits is a mile long.
But I’ve never had a client say that they feel worse because of making exercise and training a regular part of their lives.
5) Journal / plan
So far.. the tips I’ve shared have been directly associated with your physical health.
… This is a little bit of a different one.
Having coached many busy people, I’ve noticed that one of the biggest challenges busy people face is being spread too thin.
Therefore time management has to become an elite skill.
This is something I have personally struggled with my whole life…
But I’ve been forced to get better at managing my time.
I actually purchased a journal from a gym owner in Seattle, that was designed to make you more productive as a gym owner.
I tried it for 90 days and it was so good that I’ve now done it everyday for over a year.
It’s made me more consistent with my workouts, my appointments and showing gratitude on a daily basis.
It’s hard to cater for our physical health if our life is chaotic.
So making sure that you set time aside for prioritisation and time management activities will help create enough structure to allow you to be consistent with your health and fitness.
I also have several clients who make a practice of keeping a diary… and you don’t even need to know anything else about them, but you can confidently guess they’re getting great results.
Why?
Because they’re organised and intentional about what they’re doing.
If you don’t do it already.
I strongly recommend keeping a daily journal or planner and being sure to include things that are relevant to your health and fitness.
In summary
We’ve touched on 5 daily practices, to help you FEEL at your best.
Get high quality Sleep.
Drink water.
Get outside.
Exercise.
Journal.
All of these practices can be linked together in some way.
But for now… prioritise one
Focus on making that particular practice an integral part of your day.
And then move onto another.
I can guarantee you’ll start to feel better!