Living a healthy lifestyle should be a goal that everyone works towards. Unfortunately, many people sacrifice healthy habits for other priorities, such as work, school, or binge-watching media content. While it can feel tempting to sacrifice one or more elements of healthy living for an immediate benefit, a healthy lifestyle must be maintained over the long term. Small sacrifices to healthy living add up day to day, and result in severe health consequences over time.
Although healthy living might sound complicated, in practice it’s actually very simple. Healthy living simply means making sure that your needs are met, whether those are physical or emotional. By following a few guidelines, you can be well on your way to a sustainable, happy, and healthy lifestyle. Here are the top five tips for healthy living and wellbeing.
Exercise Regularly
While it may seem obvious, exercise is one of the most commonly sacrificed aspects of healthy living. It is extremely important for individuals to exercise regularly in order to maintain healthy physical fitness and wellbeing. Although exercise is a vital part of healthy living, regular exercise does not necessarily mean going to the gym or a several-mile-long jog every day.
Rather, you should aim to stay active for sixty minutes a day according to the World Health Organization, and this exercise can include things like going for a walk or biking to and from work. By exercising even mildly but consistently every day, you can make sure that your body is functioning properly and avoid any health consequences associated with a sedentary lifestyle.
Sleep For Long Enough
Sleep is another part of healthy living that often is not given enough attention. Although sleep might seem like wasted time, that is far from the truth. Sleep is one of the most important activities people undergo in a day, and a lack of sleep can have serious health consequences down the line. Studies have shown that an adult between the ages of 18 and 60 should be sleeping at least seven hours per night. During sleep, the body undergoes a variety of critical processes necessary not just to healthy living, but living in general.
Sleep is divided into three main stages. These are light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. In each stage, different recovery and cleansing activities occur within the body. Sleep allows the body to refresh itself physically and mentally, as well as purge toxins and other contaminants. If individuals fail to sleep enough, the stages of sleep which normally occur in a cycle become disrupted, resulting in poor sleep and an inability for the body to properly recover, resulting in issues with focus, performance, and attention in the short term, and even severe psychological symptoms such as delirium and death if sleep deprivation continues.
Eat Healthy Food
Although most of the conversation in popular media surrounding healthy eating tends to be hyper-fixated on calories, caloric intake is not the only aspect of healthy eating that needs to be taken into consideration. Human beings require a wide variety of essential vitamins and nutrients to function properly. A deficiency in any of these essential nutrients can result in effects such as constant fatigue, headaches, or nausea. It’s important, therefore, to eat a wide range of foods, including seafood and dark leafy greens, in order to obtain all necessary nutrients from the food you eat.
Live In A Clean Environment
The environment that we live in also plays a role in contributing to overall health and wellbeing. One of the most overlooked environmental threats to physical health is dust. Many individuals live in small enclosed bedrooms without cleaning or dusting very often. Dust contains a variety of substances, including tiny particles of sand, wood, human skin, and dead insects.
This mixture can irritate the lungs, resulting in symptoms such as a sore throat, sneezing, or coughing in the short run, and more severe long-term health effects such as lung disease over time. It’s important that individuals dust their living spaces when necessary in order to remove dust before it’s breathed in. If you genuinely do not have time to clean at home, it may be worthwhile to do a quick online search for “house cleaning services near me” in order to ensure your long-term health.
Get Regular Checkups
Finally, regular checkups should never be put off during the year. These checkups, which typically occur once or twice a year, allow doctors to practice preventative healthcare and ensure that you are physically and mentally well. Even though you may not feel sick when you visit the doctor’s office during a check-up, scheduled checkups help doctors identify any early signs of a severe medical condition. Visiting the doctor for an annual check-up also promotes overall physical health and wellbeing, as a doctor will typically nudge you towards healthy life habits in the future.
