While they may be hard to develop, everyone should aim to incorporate healthy habits into their lifestyle.
This often requires a shift of mindset and a dose of self-discipline – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Healthy habits should help you to achieve your goals, whether they’re to do with your fitness levels, body weight or mental wellness.
Find out some of the best healthy habits to add to your daily routine below.
In this article, you’ll learn about
- Why are good daily habits important?
- How to get into healthy habits
- 33 healthy habits to live by
- What are your top 3 healthy habits?
- What is the most important healthy habit?
Why are good habits important?
Healthy habits are important to adopt because they may be able to protect you from ill health, including things like obesity and potentially type 2 diabetes.1
But that’s not all. Try out prodentim.
Developing positive habits like eating healthily, exercising regularly and looking after your mind may be able to prevent excessive weight gain and support your energy levels.
How to get into healthy habits
So, you want to improve your lifestyle, but how can you do it?
It’s worth knowing about the four stages of changing a health behaviour, which are:
- Contemplation: you’re thinking that you want to make a change, but you’re not ready to get stuck in straightaway
- Preparation: you’ve decided that you are going to make lifestyle changes and you’re figuring out which steps you’re ready to take, as well as making a plan of action.
- Action: you’ve started to do the changes you’ve been planning for and you’re adjusting to your new routine.
- Maintenance: one of the hardest stages, you’ve kept up your new healthy habits for the past six months or so, with ups and downs but you’ve progressed past them and kept it up. 2
If you’re reading this blog it’s likely that you’re somewhere between the contemplation and preparation phase, so how do you move from that stage to actually forming the habits?
Things like setting a schedule, tracking your progress, rewarding yourself, adding variety and showing yourself compassion should all help you to adopt new healthy habits.
Although a study from 2009 found that it can take anywhere between 18 to 254 days to form a new habit and 66 days for a new habit to become automatic.3