Getting and staying healthy rarely seems easy. If it were so simple, would we be supporting a weight-loss industry worth more than $72 billion? Would we be buying magazines, browsing websites, and reading books about all the ways in which we can shed pounds, heal injuries, and improve our mental health? It’s easy to imagine that the path to getting healthy is paved with obsessive research, big changes, and constant work.
In reality, though, health is a little simpler. In fact, our health relies a great deal on things that take virtually no effort: our habits. With good habits, we’ll be healthy. With bad ones — well, you get the idea.
The trick, of course, is to set ourselves up for success. Habits take very little energy to execute, but they do take energy to change. If we want to be healthy, we need to create new environments, new habits, and new routines. Do that, and we can get healthy (and stay that way) without much effort at all.
Home, Sweet Home
Your home improvements can make you healthier. If you provide the right environment, healthy habits and routines will fit right into it.
There’s a reason that there’s a lot of demand for hot tub services in New Jersey, on the West Coast, and everywhere in between. A hot tub is a wonderful thing that offers a whole lot of relaxation and fun. But there’s even better news: On top of everything else, a hot tub can actually make you healthier. A hot tub is like a hot spring in your own backyard. Heat is great for cramps and other muscle illnesses, and relaxation is great for your mental health. Just be sure to treat your hot tub like a hot spring in terms of safety by not staying in the tub for too long in any one session.
Installing improvements like hot tubs can make your space more conducive to a healthy lifestyle. Saunas have benefits similar to hot tubs. And it’s not just about relaxing tubs and saunas; you can encourage exercise and fun by installing an in-ground pool or any kind of sports or exercise space that you can afford.
And what about where you sleep? A dark, quiet, and comfortable bedroom are essential for good sleep. Similarly, a well-organized, clean, and fully outfitted kitchen will make you more likely to cook healthy home-cooked meals instead of reaching for takeout yet again.
Getting in the Habit
What you do is more habitual than you might think. To get healthier, you’ll need to crack the habit code and actively replace bad habits.
To do this, you’ll need to look for habit “triggers.” For instance, perhaps you snack at three in the afternoon every day because you get bored. After identifying that trigger, you might replace the reward: For example, you might say that you’ll play a few minutes of video games at 3 p.m. every day, or call up a friend to chat. With the same trigger and a new, non-edible reward, you may see your health improve.
Building good habits is important, too, of course. You could add supplements to your morning ritual, for example. A multivitamin could do you some good. So could CBD, a hemp product that is all the rage in health circles these days. Though it comes from hemp, CBD is not the same thing as the drug marijuana. Marijuana’s famous high comes from THC, not CBD. By separating CBD from THC and the rest of the marijuana plant, health pros can make a product that offers the full spectrum of CBD’s health benefits without including the parts of the hemp plant that could intoxicate you. This also means that CBD is widely legal compared to hemp and marijuana more generally. Without THC levels high enough to upset federal agencies, a strain of premium CBD flower can be a perfectly legal part of your habitual health routine. You don’t have to limit yourself to CBD flower (which is hemp without THC content), either. You can opt for CBD products like CBD tinctures, CBD edibles, CBD vapes, and more. Of course, if premium CBD flower is what you want, you’ll find plenty of strains like CBD Dawg available from reliable sellers and reviewed on reputable websites, like Plain Jane.
Building Sustainable Routines
Much of what we do is about habits, and habits are closely related to routines. What we do every morning, afternoon, and evening is largely up to us, and consciously shifting our routine can shift our unconscious habits, too. That’s good news. The bad news, though, is that not all routines are sustainable.
This is the problem with crash diets and other huge, overnight health overhauls. These things don’t work because it’s too hard to stick to them — and too easy to go back to old ways, even if we do achieve a transformation. The better move is to make simple and sustainable changes to our lifestyles.
That means choosing to eat our fill of healthy things instead of going on calorie-deprivation diets. Aim to eat fewer unprocessed foods and more “whole” (unprocessed) foods. Make changes a little at a time, and set achievable goals that focus on what you’re doing, rather than what you’re getting out of things (for instance, you might set a goal to eat a salad for lunch two to three times per week, rather than setting a goal to lose eight pounds in a month). Keep at it and keep making changes bit by bit. If you can remake your lifestyle, your health will follow.
