Winter. This season may be a hot chocolate, cozy blankets, and fireplace kinda season for most. It’s all about celebrations, getting cozy, and living your life to the fullest during the holidays. What these people don’t see is that winter is also a season of restarting habits. When a new year or a new season starts, people often make resolutions or a list of goals that they want to achieve that year. Winter is just that season, but many don’t realize it. So when this winter comes, instead of focusing on just the little decorations that will go up the Christmas tree, look at the habits you want to restart.
1. Keeping Yourself Active
When winter comes, all of us have just one new favorite spot where we can be found at any hour of the day: our beds. Whether it’s during the day, nighttime, or especially during the morning, our bodies get strangely attached to it and just the thought of leaving our beds leaves us disturbed. But that’s not going to be the case for you this winter. Keeping yourself active will have a great impact on your body.
- Start with warm-ups: nobody likes to start off with 50 pushups as soon as they wake up. If you truly want to be consistently active, start with warm-ups. This can be something as small as doing jumping jacks to let your body loose and start.
- Start slow: don’t be too hard on yourself the very first few days. Let your body get used to the workout by starting slowly. Start off with, let’s say, 5 pushups per day, if you’re not someone who exercises frequently. You can increase this to 10 pushups for the next day, and 15 to the next one. In this way, you won’t feel overburdened all at once and you’ll actually find yourself liking your new exercise routine.
- Keep a planner: just like every other plan in your life, keep a planner for your exercise routine as well. Whichever exercises you want to start off with, write them down. Also write down the number of times you need to do that exercise in a day as well. Whenever you cross off your daily exercise achievements, you will feel truly accomplished.
- Set goals: setting measurable fitness goals is the way to achieve your body goals and also achieve a sense of activeness. Whenever we start any task or activity, we have a certain goal in mind that we look forward to. This goal keeps us motivated throughout our journey as well. Therefore, whenever you feel like you’re losing your will to continue, you can always look at your fitness goals and feel motivated again.
When you keep yourself active, you achieve more goals, get stronger mentally and physically, and accomplish more.
2. Eating Healthy
There’s nothing better than indulging in a bowl full of sweet treats. Having your favorite ice cream in the bathtub, eating that chocolate bar before going to sleep, and having something sweet to constantly much on. However, the horror arises when the consequences of unhealthy eating show up in your body. So, how can you switch to a healthier diet?
- Cut down sugar: there’s nothing harder than cutting down sugar, I say as a sweet food lover. But sugar is what shows up first thing on your face in the form of acne, your body in the form of fats, and even causes health problems. You can switch to a sweetener if you’re really craving it, though.
- Incorporate rich foods: there are certain foods and fruits, known for their numerous health benefits and healing properties. Incorporating such foods into your diet will fix health problems that you never even knew existed, enhance your overall health, and boost your metabolism. Some of these include cranberry juice, garlic, salmon, black beans, and lentils.
- Eat more greens: eating greens does not always have to be boring. Find a way to balance your life between eating greens and also devouring that steak. Incorporate greens in your diet in such a way that your diet is not completely changed. You can also eat greens as sidelines.
- Cut down junk food: junk food, such as chips, soda, and other foods rich in sugar and fat, need to be avoided at all costs in order to lead a healthy eating routine. If you’re an avid junk food eater, it may be difficult for you at first but once you get into it, it becomes easy.
Eating healthy will not only cleanse your body externally, but internally as well. Switching to a healthier diet will improve blood flow, enhance organs productivity, and have an overall positive impact on your body.
3. Create a Daily Routine
Daily routines can be a great way of living your life and keeping track of everything you need to accomplish in your routine. A daily routine doesn’t have to be all business, work, or studies-related. You can always keep some time in there for that extra nap, time out with friends, or doing your favorite activity.
- Write down your tasks: these tasks don’t only have to be related to your work or college, but everything you need to get done in a day. Make a list of these tasks and also write down the time at which you need to do them, along with the time duration you think would be required to complete that task.
- Edit your routine: once you have listed down all your tasks, make edits and swap tasks as needed. Some tasks are time-sensitive, so make sure to prioritize those and keep those with lesser priority at a later time. Look for the best app to organize your life and seek help from it as well.
- Set daily goals: setting daily goals will motivate you to achieve your daily routine and perform all tasks as needed. You also need to make sure that the daily goals you set are achievable and not something as big as a long-term goal. For instance, completing 2 chapters in one day is an achievable daily goal, but completing 20 chapters in one day isn’t.
Creating a daily routine and sticking to it is a great way of sorting your life and achieving more throughout your day. Another great part about creating a daily routine is that you don’t miss out on important deadlines because everything is already in your schedule.
4. Waking Up Earlier than Usual
In winter, waking up seems like a daunting challenge. But waking up earlier than your usual time will have great benefits.
- Better sleep: if you go to sleep at the same time every day and wake up at the same time every day, this will help you sleep much better, as opposed to irregular sleep schedules.
- More Vitamin D: did you know that the morning sunlight’s rays, when hit your skin, convert a certain chemical into Vitamin D? It’s time to wake up early to get that Vitamin D!
- More time for you: Waking up early gives you more time in the day to focus on completing other tasks or even work on achieving your goals.
Waking up early may seem like a tough task at first, but in just a few weeks, your body will adjust to it and you will reap the benefits of waking up early.
5. Focus on Your Mental Health
We do a lot throughout our day to improve our physical health, achieve our goals, and enhance our overall physical abilities. We do all of these so much that we often forget to take care of our mental health – something that’s so important, perhaps as equally important as our physical health. Here are some ways through which you can take care of your mental health.
- Journaling: many of us do not feel comfortable venting to others or talking about our feelings all the time. If you’re an emotional person, like me, carrying around your emotions without knowing where to dump them, get yourself a journal. Writing your feelings down in your personal journal will give you a safe space where you can be yourself unapologetically and not fear what anyone else thinks of you.
- Gratitude: even if we feel like we have a lot going on, we always have a lot to be grateful for. Never losing sight of things you have to be grateful for is how you focus on the positives in your life and stay happy about the little things – although they’re not even that little as we think of them to be.
- Try relaxing activities: we don’t realize how much stress we’re actually under, until we feel it in our body. Carrying out relaxing activities, such as breathing exercises, is good for letting stress out of your body and feeling better.
Focusing on your mental health will help you conquer a lot on your own while also staying true to your ground.
6. Becoming Self-Aware
By becoming self-aware, you will understand your feelings better and see where you’re coming from or identify any triggers if needed. Also by becoming self-aware, you won’t lash out at others because you would be able to deal with your feelings in a much better and healthy manner. You can gain lots of benefits from becoming self-aware.
- Knowing yourself: for starters, you would know what you want and why you want it and what you need to do in order to achieve it. You would also be able to control how you present yourself in front of others because you would also know about your strengths and weaknesses.
- Better decisions: self-awareness is all about knowing everything about yourself and acting accordingly – which also leads to decision-making, which you would highly benefit from.
- Enhancing yourself: moving forward to your more internal traits that would enhance because of being self-aware, you would become more grounded which will serve as a constant reminder as to who you are, what you stand for, and what you need in your professional and personal life.
- Becoming empathetic: by fostering empathy, you would learn to communicate better with others and connect with them at a deeper and personal level.
By becoming self-aware, you would get to know yourself better, know what things you need to do to enhance your lifestyle, and learn to make better decisions as well.
7. Take Out Time for Self-Care
Self-care doesn’t always have to be a big day at the spa, getting a fancy treatment done. Self-care can be something as small as doing something you love, putting on a face mask for ten minutes, or just looking after yourself!
- Set a self-care day: for me, this is usually a Sunday. I devote my Sundays to self-care where I put on face masks, hair masks, take bubble baths, and just take care of my overall wellbeing.
- Use DIY stuff: a lot of DIY masks can be dangerous for your skin, if they include harmful chemicals, such as lemon or baking soda. However, using DIY face masks of natural ingredients, such as honey and Aloe Vera, is actually pretty good for your skin!
- Minimize screen-time: using your phone all the time is not only bad for your eyes, but also for your mental health. Minimize your screen-time by indulging in other activities and not losing sight of the important things – this is also a form of self-care.
- Make a self-care schedule: yes, making a self-care schedule and sticking to it is a great way to ensure you’re taking care of yourself and not letting yourself get swamped by your daily tasks. You can include everything you need to do to take care of yourself.
By practicing self-care, you will be giving yourself the treatment that you deserve and setting standards high for yourself too.
Concluding Thoughts
This winter, change up your habits by practicing a whole new routine and incorporating the good stuff in your life. By taking small steps, you can transform your life into whatever shape you wish to give it to achieve your ultimate goals!
