Our daily routines shape the people we become. After all, you and I are simply the product of our habits. For example, if you have a habit of overeating, you might gain more weight than your body needs. If you do 100 push-ups daily, you’ll likely develop your chest and arm muscles. Whatever you spend your time doing, you become. Usually, it’s not the big things that happen in life that change you in a meaningful way, it’s the small actions that add up over time that can truly change your life. In this post, we’ll look at some life-changing habits, the small things that could make a big impact in your life if you do them consistently.
If you’re stuck in a rut, you might need to simply tweak a few things to start seeing things in a different light. These small life-changing habits have helped me to feel more positive, productive and hopeful in life not to mention more disciplined.
Developing new habits takes time and consistency and it takes far longer than 21 days to form a new habit as everyone is different so don’t be discouraged if you trip up along the way.
1. Tidy something every day, in the morning
When you rise in the morning, find something to tidy like making your bed. When you do this, you’ll find that you set a good, productive tone for your day. It seems there’s always something to tidy or organise but by selecting just one thing no matter how small it is and clearing it up, you give yourself a small win.
What you can do: Pick something – it could be anything. Organise or tidy it early in the morning before you start getting ready for the day so you can come home later with that thing already ticked off your to-do list.
2. Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
According to experts, most healthy adults need at least 7 hours of sleep a night to feel refreshed and energised in the morning. Sleep is more important than we think, it’s the time when our cells heal and when we experience vital deep rest. We all know what it feels like to be sleep-deprived. It affects your entire day, making you sluggish, causing you to make bad decisions and sometimes be rude to others. Simply upping your daily sleep by one hour could be one of the most impactful life-changing habits to develop in itself.
What you can do: Settle down earlier than usual. Perhaps you could try going to bed just 30 minutes earlier to start with. Don’t scroll on your phone before bedtime so you don’t feel overstimulated. Make your room as dark as possible and in the long term, get yourself some high-quality bedding.
3. Eat to feel well
Nutrition might be as important as sleep – at least in my experience. One of the biggest life-changing habits I have personally developed was eating to feel well. For me, this meant trying to eat mostly unprocessed foods, foods that are as close as possible to their natural form as possible. This finally helped me to lose weight after years of trial and error. But that’s just me. Everyone is different so find a way of eating that makes you feel well, less bloated and less foggy. Weight is its own thing but eating to feel well should be the target in my opinion.
What you can do: Research new meals that look appealing to you that also involve high-quality, unprocessed foods. Try them out and if you don’t like them keep trying different recipes until you find something that you love!
4. Be mindful of what you eat
While eating, take your time to chew and swallow your food, showing gratitude for the flavours and textures. When you’re done, pay close attention to how you feel over the next couple of hours. Do you have a stomach ache or need the toilet more than usual? Understanding how your body reacts to different foods can help you to make better food choices going forward. After all, you’re not supposed to be in pain or discomfort after a meal, unless you eat a very large portion. Keep looking at your diet and remove the things that don’t make you feel good.
What you can do: Take 10 seconds to observe your food before you eat it. Take in the smells and colours. Begin to eat your food slowly, noticing the textures and tastes. Listen to your hunger signals to avoid feeling bloated and sore from overeating.
5. Be kind, consistently
Remember to compliment and be kind to others whenever you can. We have no idea what people are going through and a simple compliment or an act of kindness can lift them more than we know whilst making us feel good at the same time. You cannot control how others behave but you can always control how you behave, what you say and what you do. Be the person you would want to be around. This is a simple habit, perhaps an overlooked behaviour but it’s more powerful than we think and is one of the biggest life-changing habits in my experience because being kind leaves little room for negativity or resentment allowing you to exist in a better mood more often.
What you can do: Compliment someone every day, hold a door open or offer to do something to help someone. You may be surprised at how good it makes you feel too!
6. Do some kind of movement
We weren’t put here to sit in chairs all day, trying to find a perfect state of comfort. Human beings are animals that need to move and if you don’t use it you really do lose it. According to experts, we need at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week to stay healthy. You know your own body so you might feel good with slightly less or slightly more than this. Doing some kind of exercise can be one of the best life-changing habits you can develop because it can increase your energy and strength. It allows you to set and break goals, creating a habit of gaining small wins. If you’re stuck in a rut, challenge yourself with exercise. It will help you not just physically but mentally too.
What you can do: In, my experience there’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to exercise. Go online and look for different exercise routines until one calls to you personally. Take it step by step and see how it makes you feel.
7. Practise gratitude
Practising gratitude can be a life-changing habit if you do it consistently. Gratitude has many benefits including improving your mood and lowering stress. There’s always something to be grateful for including (and in my opinion, most importantly) all the small things we take for granted each day like a warm drink, running water, our beds and a roof over our heads. As life gets busier, we sometimes take these things for granted. By keeping these things in mind you can find a greater sense of gratitude for the bigger things like the family and friends in your life.
What you can do: Pick a few things you feel grateful for. Spend a few minutes thinking about how each thing or person makes you feel. If you like, you can write this down, as if you were writing a letter to each.
8. Reflect without stimuli
Finding time to sit and just be still can be a habit that changes your life. With the go, go, go nature of modern Western life, there’s rarely ever a chance to simply sit and be still with your thoughts. Whether it’s your phone, work, traffic or television always grabbing your attention, it can be hard to simply just ‘be’ without some kind of external stimuli. Practising stillness has many benefits including helping you to lower your stress, engage with your intuition and ground yourself in the present moment – perhaps things we assign little importance to in our busy lives.
What you can do: Practising stillness doesn’t have to mean you need to meditate. Simply finding a comfortable spot on the beach or a bench, for example, can help you to decompress and take a moment to think in peace so you can ultimately gather your thoughts. You can also practise stillness by simply taking a pause before you eat to smell your food or take some long, deep breaths before you leave for work in the morning.
9. Do not react to anger with anger
How much further anger is caused by reacting to anger? When someone cuts you off in traffic or someone insults you or a loved one it’s easy to react instinctively with the same anger or more. Your ego becomes insulted and perhaps you feel humiliated in front of others. It’s a situation we’ve all been in but how do you feel after you’ve walked away? Personally, I feel as if I carry that anger with me throughout the rest of my day, holding onto it when the situation was caused by someone else.
A life-changing habit that has helped me overcome situations like this has been understanding when I feel like I want to react and catching myself. I ask myself; “Do I want to be like them?” The answer is always no. So, I try and be mindful of my emotions. Of course, this isn’t always easy, after all, we’re all human and don’t enjoy being insulted!
However, if you can learn to understand and observe your emotions through mindfulness you can (with time and practice) gain a sense of control over yourself and stop yourself from being pulled around by your emotions.
What you can do: When you feel like reacting, observe yourself – what is it you want to say back? how does your body feel? Will you feel better by reacting with anger? Sometimes simply being mindful of your current state is enough to see that it is not worth aggravating things more.
10. Don’t fret over what is out of your control
There are many different things that are out of our control, whether we like it or not. Unfortunately, we can become consumed with those things and it causes us to lose direction on the things we can influence and improve in our lives. A good habit to try and get into is to focus your time and efforts on the things that are within your control. We only have so much energy and time during the day to spend on different things so spend your time on the things that truly make a difference.
Don’t become consumed by thoughts that lead you around in circles and keep you preoccupied. Don’t fret over someone’s opinion of you, for example, focus on yourself and how you behave as this is within your control.
What you can do: Make a list of the things that bother you. Now consider which is within your control or which is not. Cross out the ones that are not within your control to get a better idea of what is worth spending your time and thoughts on.
11. Treat each day as special
Treat each day as special, as if it’s a precious gift you have been given. If that was your perspective, what would you do? What would you tell those that you love? Allow yourself to find a sense of gratitude once more for the small things that make your life worthwhile. Gaze at nature, look at the stars with wonder and connect with your family and friends without expectation. Life, if you ask me, is a precious gift. It’s an experience that is short but filled with amazing things – things we don’t even understand most of the time.
What you can do: Every day of your life is like a fresh opportunity to find gratitude and discover something new and exciting to learn about. When you wake up in the morning, set an intention – something you’d like to achieve that day.
12. Celebrate your own achievements
When you’ve done a good job, don’t be afraid to celebrate your successes! There have been plenty of times where I’ve allowed imposter syndrome to take over or brush off my own achievements as luck, for example. However, I think it’s important to celebrate a job well done. Everything you achieve helps to build your confidence and understanding of what you can achieve. When you do something well, tick it off your list and aim for something else.
Likewise, when someone else does something well, celebrate with them and build an environment of encouragement around yourself.
What you can do: Celebrate your achievements when they happen. Spend some time enjoying yourself and reflecting on what you did well.
13. Learn to focus on one task at a time
Too often multi-tasking is seen as a good thing and something to strive for. However, in my experience, it leads to rather unfocused work. The best artists create the best music because they lock themselves in basements for months. The best writers create their best work by locking their phones away and turning off the internet on their computers. Learning to concentrate on one task at a time can be a life-changing habit because it teaches you to focus for long periods of time – something that we are becoming worse at.
Create yourself an environment that allows you to focus on whatever it is you’re trying to achieve. Everything wants your attention and if you’re not careful your focus can become fractured, causing your work to suffer.
What you can do: Sit down at your desk and disable the internet whilst you write. If you get text messages or emails on your phone during work, put your phone in another room or in your bag on silent mode. Try and do 30 minutes of solid work without checking on anything else.
14. Do something uncomfortable every week
Everyone needs a challenge from time to time. If you don’t have a challenge you can never learn or grow. Find a way to get out of your comfort zone and throw yourself into something that requires you to learn new things, helping you to broaden your horizons. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found routines that have helped me to find more and more comfort but this eventually made me feel as if I was stuck, never really growing as a person. It was not until I challenged myself to try new things that I felt a real sense of growth and encouragement from within that I was capable of more than I realised.
What you can do: You could do something outside of your comfort zone by signing up for a new course about something you know very little about, doing strenuous exercise routines or begin learning a new language, for example. However, it doesn’t need to be something too outside of your reach. Even with something small, you may just find that the world opens up a little more and this could have a life-changing effect.
15. Be strict with yourself and patient with others
You cannot change others but you can be strict with yourself. This means you always have the choice when it comes to your own behaviour. Being strict with yourself means almost becoming your ‘own parent’. For example, the day I looked in the mirror and decided I wasn’t happy with my body was the day I knew I needed to do something. Sitting in a chair all day without exercise had made me soft and doughy almost unrecognisable to myself. I knew I needed to be stricter on myself. It dawned on me that when it came down to it – no one was going to get myself fit apart from me. There are just some things we have to do for ourselves through consistency and discipline.
This discipline isn’t just about your figure – it could literally be about anything. Finding discipline in your life can help you to build better, stronger habits. I adopted a ‘now or never’ mindset when I knew I had to shift a few pounds and it helped me to be strict with myself and take my weight loss seriously for once.
At the same time, remembering that others have their own perspective and so will do things differently from you has also been key for me personally. Patience really is a virtue and something that is difficult to master but worthy of pursuit.
What you can do: Read books on how to create self-discipline and take it step by step. Think about what you want to change and what kind of discipline you’d need to create to make it happen.
16. Save for a rainy day
Saving money is difficult, especially when you live paycheck to paycheck as many do. I wish I started putting some money aside each month when I was younger even if was only a few pennies here and there. If you can put a small amount of money aside each month you’ll be surprised how quickly it adds up. Having an emergency fund or savings is a great way to relieve stress because you always know you have some backup if you need to get something repaired or replaced.
What you can do: Put a small amount of money aside every time you get paid. Put it in a separate bank account and allow it to sit there and accumulate. If you do it as soon as you get paid, you’ll be less likely to spend it. When you see it building, it will motivate you to try and put more and more away.
17. Focus on your mental health more often
Focusing on your mental health can be a life-changing habit because it state affects everything in life. Depending on how you feel, you see the world in a certain way. Looking after your mental health can mean several things, depending on how you feel. If you’re struggling, you may need to speak to a therapist. If you’re going through a rut and you feel a bit fed up with things, you may need a different philosophy to follow. Finding a philosophy that spoke and made sense to me has helped me more than I can describe.
For example, many lessons from the Stoics have given me a new perspective on life and changed the way I view myself and the world hugely – I’d go as far as saying the teachings and messages have been life-changing, helping me to deal with some of life’s obstacles. However, you may find something different that speaks to you personally so look around, read, watch and learn until you find a philosophy that calls to you.
Take some time out for yourself now and again to realign what’s important to you and what you want your life to look like.
What you can do: Spend a moment or two asking yourself how you feel – how you truly feel. Now think about what steps you could take to change how you’re feeling. Don’t be afraid to reach out to a loved one or a friend to vent. Just take that first step and you’ll be well on your way to finding the help you need.
Life-changing habits are usually found in the small things
My life-changing habits have helped to take me from being unorganised to being more disciplined. After I saw the benefits of these habits in day-to-day life, it became easier to keep doing them. Half the battle is simply sticking to a new routine for long enough or until the point where you see or feel a real return.
Have you ever begun some life-changing habits of your own? Perhaps they are different from my list. Let me know in the comments!