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It is easy to forget about ourselves and our wellbeing when much of our time is taken up with work and family. Introducing a “detox” day into your life is a chance for you to reevaluate and realign your habits, your lifestyle choices and reconnect with yourself. This time allows us to understand what we are prioritising in our life and whether we are living our day to day lives in a way that puts our mental health, wellbeing and goals first.
The great outdoors
A daily walk has quickly become a new habit for many of us. It is a chance to step away from the home office to destress, regain clarity as well as inject a sense of calm back into the day. It doesn’t have to be long; studies have shown that a 20 – 30 minute daily walk has been shown to strengthen heart health, reduces fatigue and boost emotional wellbeing.
Declutter
Having a safe space is an integral role in supporting and taking care of our mental health, a space that makes unwinding & relaxing that little bit easier. The more mess and clutter we allow into this space, the foggier our minds can become.
Decluttering on a regular basis eliminates anything that may be causing you to feel anything but calm. Tidying your space, whether that is every morning before work or every evening before bed, can become a rewarding habit that will help you feel accomplished every day. Living in a clutter free space has been shown to impact positively on our mental health while reducing stress and anxiety levels.
Set goals
Setting goals gives us an opportunity to focus our creativity & drive to work towards something that we are determined to achieve. The most common time for us to create a new set of goals is on New Year’s Eve. Kicking off a new year with a renewed sense of ambition and motivation is fantastic, however, many of us forget the smaller steps we need to take in order to achieve those large goals.
Rather than setting a handful of enormous goals for the whole year, opt for smaller, monthly goals. Whatever those goals may be, note them down somewhere safe and check back in with this list at the end of the month. Write down what you achieved and how it made you feel and then look at what you didn’t get to do. Reflect on why some of your goals didn’t happen, how you can change this moving forward and add it to next month’s list.
The continuous cycle of prioritising you, your needs and goal setting will help you feel a greater sense of accomplishment as well as having a positive impact on your wellbeing to help you progress through the year.
Mindfulness Activities
Introducing mindfulness into your daily routine is a chance to check in with ourselves and realign our minds back into a positive and clear headspace. Decreased stress levels, improving our moods, as well as our abilities on how to handle stress and daily challenges, are just some of the lifestyle benefits to mindfulness.
In the same way that daily exercise improves our cardiovascular health, mediation, journaling and controlled breathing helps take care of our mental health.
Digital Detox
We use them to connect, plan and work so it makes sense that our devices are never further than an arm’s reach away. Technology is one of the leading causes for an increase in anxiety, depression and insomnia. Of course, it isn’t simply the device itself, it is what we put on it.
Social media and technology have created a new wave of what scientists are concerned is the addiction of our time. Receiving notifications about likes, comments or shares on your posts has been shown to stimulate the response of our “happy hormone”, dopamine, which creates an addictive feeling. Our minds are continuously stimulated by the blue light emitted from our devices, making it harder for us to relax or unwind. Using devices an hour or two prior to going to bed reduces the production of melatonin, making it harder for us to fall asleep and thus impacting our health.
A digital detox is not about deleting all social media accounts and abandoning your phone. It’s about step- ping back, evaluating what is important to us and setting boundaries to ensure that we are using our devices and accounts in a way that benefits our daily life as opposed to harming it.
We can all agree that we have been through extremely challenging times and have been tested in ways that we never expected. Putting yourself and your wellbeing first should always be one of your top priorities. This time for yourself will help you recharge, recover and, most importantly, rest. Don’t ever be afraid to block off ‘me time’ in your calendar! Hitting the reset button on your life and your lifestyle might be the spring clean you didn’t even know you needed!