The first step to living a healthier lifestyle comes with a conscious effort to make a healthy, productive routine, and the first step to doing that is by turning those bad habits into good habits.
Here are a few that you can start breaking, as well as good habits that you can replace them with instead:
1. Staying Up Too Late
Unless your work has to carry on well into the night (or if you have a passion project that you’re working on), staying up too late staring at a screen can reduce your sleep quality and impact your health in the long run.
Replace With: A pre-sleep routine with slow, deep breathing exercises, dim lighting, and even a few minutes of reading a book before going to bed can help signal your brain that it’s time to go to sleep.
2. Smoking
There’s really no excuse for smoking. It puts you at and the people around you at risk for serious conditions later on in life. However, the good news is that smoking-related conditions are highly preventable.
Replace With: Quitting smoking is not easy, but it can be done. There are a lot of steps you can take, such as drinking more water and cutting off all access to cigarettes and triggers that can tempt you to smoke.
3. Stress Eating
There’s a difference between loving food and binge-eating in that while the former is done out of love for gastronomy, the other is a bad way to cope with stress or deal with emotions, and can easily lead to serious weight gain.
Replace With: There are lots of ways to better handle stress – the first of which is by opening up to someone you can trust about the problems in your life.
4. Binge Drinking
Having a good time with friends isn’t at all a bad thing, and neither is having a drink to unwind after a long day. However, excessive drinking by yourself is never a good thing, and certainly not a good way to cope with stress.
Replace With: There are other, much better ways to handle stress and the negatives in life that come your way – and it all starts by opening up to someone who you can trust.
5. Being Too Negative All the Time
Seeing the negative side of a situation can be a good thing, but when all you do is focus on the negative side, there’s no room left to grow and improve yourself to overcome obstacles and come out as a better person.
Replace With: A more positive attitude starts by consciously trying to find the positive in every negative situation you run into. Be sure to do this for a week.
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