Little Habits to Improve Your Daily Life

As much as we like to think it, even people on Instagram don´t lead the perfect lives. It´s what everyone wants though, isn´t it? Getting up early, working out, eating well, having an exciting and productive day, going to bed early, repeat. Ah, how I wish my life would look like this! I´ve compiled a list of 10 little habits that can improve your daily life so that you´ll come a bit closer to the dream. I´ll definitely be using these in the upcoming months as I go back to uni soon and that always messes with my life a lot.

Exercise I For a few weeks I´ve been incorporating exercise into my week and after a long and horrible time of not doing any exercise I already feel so much better (except for sore muscles). It doesn´t always need to be an hour long workout, sometimes just 20 minutes of Zumba is enough to get your heart racing and make you feel good about yourself!

Walks I Clearing your head is one of the most important things you can do. We often clutter our head with information after information and don´t give it time to process or even think correctly. A walk without headphones helps me think my thoughts through and find solutions to all my problems. It also improves my creativity!

Reading I Getting lost in a good book is the best way to escape your life for a bit. It also has a lot of benefits to you. People who regularly read tend to be more thoughtful, creative, open-minded and have a better use of language. Besides all those benefits I also find it to be one of the most relaxing things you can do.

Me Time I With social media constantly available to us we rarely spend any time truly by ourselves. It´s so important for your brain to find time to relax and wind down, it´s an organ after all and not a computer. I like to spend some me time while taking walks or while doing some kind of relaxation exercise.

Go Offline I Going hand in hand with winding down, in our modern lives we´re constantly online, we´re always wired, in a slightly tense state, always staring at some screen. It´s so important to take that constant stimulation away for a bit every day. You know how it´s good to go offline half an hour before sleep? Why not make that an hour or two? You can spend your Me Time all offline before bed.

Plan Ahead I There´s nothing worse than waking up one day and realising you´ve go a to-do list longer than your college blog. If you plan ahead and have the rest of your week in mind you´ll most likely avoid such horror. You can easily split your tasks among the days of the week and therefore have some time each day to relax.

Get Up I I know leaving your bed in the morning is the worst feeling in the world but you won´t get any work done from there. Personally, my psyche can´t deal with a day of doing nothing, so even on weekends I have to get out of bed and do something productive. Procrastination is a wonderful thing but the only way to avoid is to actually get up from your couch and do the work you´ve been procrastinating from.

Say No I Most of us are people pleaser but sometimes saying yes to everything can stress you out even more. You don´t need one more thing on your plate just to please someone else. It surely is just as hard to say yes to certain things (especially if you´re very anxious) but often social pressure makes us say yes to things we don´t want. I think finding a good balance between yes and no is what we should aspire.

Routines I Humans are bound by habits and routines, that´s a big part of our lives. Just look at religion for a while, it´s all routines and rituals. Finding a nighttime routine that allows you to get a good night´s sleep and a morning routine which leaves you feeling motivated for the day ahead is definitely key to having a good and productive day.

None of these habits will prevent you from having a bad day from time to time. Sometimes a day is just bad and nothing can change that. However, these little habits can help you reduce the number of bad days you have. It´s also about finding the habitsyou need. Maybe you don´t need a lot of sleep like me or constantly being online doesn´t stress you out.

On a side note, I also had an idea to design a kind of checklist as a printable for this. But this idea came to my mind a bit last-minute and I couldn´t figure out the whole font licenses, etc. in time. If you´d like to get a printable, please let me know and I´ll work it out in the upcoming week!

What is something you do daily that makes you happy?